The importance of being honest
On the merits of being pissed off at your friends
Sometimes, it’s inevitable that you fight with your friends. Years ago, my best friend Matthew almost punched me out in a bar because we got into a vicious argument about the definition of the word “sublime.” Yes, I know how this sounds, but I swear it is not something I half-remembered from The Savage Detectives and stole for my own backstory. Unfortunately, it’s just being 23 and too turnt up, and we were extraordinarily embarrassed in the sober light of day. Drew and I once got into a shouting match in the back of a cab, in front of our mortified friends, because he thought I was being a dick about his job. (I wasn’t trying to be, but in my defense, it was hard not to sound like an asshole when talking about Vice.) Claire and I tried dating for a summer and it went so poorly that we barely talked for five years, insane because we’d talked almost every single day of the preceding four. Dan and I have gone through lengthy patches of not-talking at least twice in our decade-plus friendship for reasons that more or less boil down to “sick of each other’s shit.”
Although I know this is just the writer’s business, I’m wary of making declarative statements about human behavior — “friendship is when TKTKTKTK,” “love happens when TKTKTK” — because it always affects this fake profundity about how people are when often the writer is just referring to, like, three alcoholics they drink with and one sexual partner who ghosted them. But in my personal experience, the friction of these arguments — the discomfort produced, and the unsettled terrain that must be smoothed out in those post-incident conversations — does lead to a strengthened relationship, inasmuch as it allows you to approach each other on more realistic terms.
The early phase of friendship has so much — not exactly posturing, but a projection of who you’d like to be with someone who doesn’t really know you at all. It’s a fantasy you can indulge for a short while: “This person is seeing me at my most charismatic and charming, which makes up for the fact that they’re essentially a stranger.” Sometimes it’s a smooth glide into true and lived-in friendship; of course, I do have friends with whom I have never fought, and I hope it stays that way. But other times you’re eventually pissed off at each other, and those lingering illusions — which can last for years — finally fall away, and you can decide if what’s left is a person you’d like to be friends with. It doesn’t always work out: There are the friends with whom I had The Talk About What’s Going On, and then that was that, and we don’t speak anymore. But if the person is not just some dickhead I see every now and then, I suppose I’d rather go through the disagreement process — be it explosive, unpleasant, melancholy, terse, whatever else — rather than let the tensions simmer unspoken for the rest of time.
The most recent and most severe “sick of your shit” phase that Dan and I went through was in 2019, when we went over half the year without speaking. In the back of my head, I understood that eventually we’d figure it out — we’d known each other too long, and we liked each other too much, to call it quits. But there were issues. When we finally sat down, we tried to talk it out as transparently as possible, and it became clear that our problems were mutually dependent. I had acquired the irritating habit of being an imperious dick about his personal decisions, which he had interpreted as sublimated bitterness over, shall we say, the rakish joie de vivre with which he carried himself. This was not entirely incorrect. But that bitterness partially arose out of the way he’d neglect some basic tenets of mutual respect and friendship in pursuit of his own thing — like, for example, the year where we lived together and he rarely paid his rent on time because he was focusing on his writing, a tense situation that produced some trouble once the landlord figured out which one of us was more accessible by phone.
Well, neither of us wanted to be at odds, and once it was all out there we agreed there had to be some change. He became more consistent, and I became less overbearing; today, it feels abundantly clear that we are much, much closer for having had it out. Perhaps this just seems like basic attentiveness in a friendship, but you know it’s not that simple. Relationships atrophy; people drift; often, one person decides it’s just not worth the effort to close the gap.
Once, when I was talking through a dating problem with my mother, she announced her belief in the inability of people to change, which she said not sadly but as a matter-of-fact truth that was meant to comfort me. At first I disagreed, because come on, how can you say people don’t change? Character development is, like, the arc of all great television shows. But I do think there is an inherent and immutable us-ness that you just have to recognize, in these long-term relationships. Even now, when Dan and I are talking about some personal issue, I can sometimes hear myself becoming paternalistic, grating, slyly judgmental, still seeking to give advice when it’s not always wanted. But at the same time, I believe he definitely knows when he’s behaving in such a way that will trigger this reaction in me, which occasionally does produce some wanted advice.
Recently he was describing some mildly pressing dilemma on his mind, something that — to me — so obviously could be resolved if he made a decision now rather than six weeks from now. Or so I thought. After exhausting all of the logic behind what would be the responsible course of action I concluded by saying “I’m so boring about this, I’m sorry.” I was thinking about this line I’d jotted down, from Constance Debre’s novel Love Me Tender: “You just need to have the guts, because everyone’s so bored, everyone’s waiting so desperately for something to happen.” Love Me Tender is about a French woman who, after her divorce from a man and custody battle over their child, decides to start sleeping with women; one thrust of the plot is her increasingly volatile dating life, and the quote I just cited concerns her realization that she can just… go for it, when it comes to pursuing sex. I did not totally love the book, but I appreciated the clarity of this perspective. Everyone is bored, everyone is waiting for something to happen. In the end, how necessary was my advice beyond making conversation? So we just moved on, happy to have talked about it without demanding more than the other could provide.
Novel time novel time novel time
Friendship, and specifically what you can really expect from another person, is one of the explored ideas of See Friendship, the novel I sold last month that will be out in 2025. I apologize in advance, because I will probably mention it in every single newsletter I write until it comes out. But this is simply how it must be, and I know you’ll understand.
Professionally speaking
In a bit of pinch-hitting after another assignment fell through, I wrote a bit about the series finale of Barry for the new job. I did not enjoy the final season, which was jarring because the first two are some of my all-time favorites; by contrast, I was so down on the finale that I started to wonder if the old stuff wasn’t as good as I thought. But no, it was — the show just changed a lot, for reasons understandable (it is Bill Hader’s show, and he can do what he want) and not (the NoHo Hank arc… a travesty).
The biggest indictment of an ending like this is that I have no desire to revisit it. Sometimes, that feeling is set in stone forever. Jen and I had been rewatching Game of Thrones, which I’d mentioned before, and the final seasons actually are that much weaker — perhaps not terrible but also sort of, you know, whatever. Not as sharp, not as tight. More recognizable as… “content.” We’d been dragging ass on finishing the seventh season — not even the last one — before, finally, we accepted defeat. On our wedding night, when we were in the hotel room trying to decompress a bit and go over the day (which, by the way, was an amazing day — highly recommend celebrating your love with all your friends and family), I made some glancing reference to the ending of Game of Thrones and realized, in that moment, that we were never going to finish it. So I just told her what happens, as she was taking the pins out of her hairdo; predictably, she was glad I spared her the trouble. That’s kind of how I feel about Barry, right now.