The Friends We Keep: A Review

When I saw Havi, my stomach dropped, then jumped. I felt the color blanch from my face. “It’s you!” I squeaked.

We had been best friends in college. We were so close in fact, that people jokingly used to tease that we were “dating,” but the years had not been kind to our friendship. After graduation, life brought both joys and pain, and the ties between Havi and I slowly snapped then riled away.

She felt abandoned and hurt by me during one of the most devastating periods in her life. And I felt as if she had permanently cast me as the monster in our friendship, never able to win redemption or reconciliation. So after a while, I simply stopped saying “sorry,” and instead said “goodbye.”

She and I both stood facing each other on the cusp of a weekend of reuniting and reconnecting. I wondered how we would get along, and if we would be able to reach across the years of separation and remember what it felt like to simply be friends.

In her book, The Friends We Keep: A Woman’s Quest for the Soul of Friendship, Sarah Zacharias Davis writes about the essence and the pains of women friendships. Having dealt with the pain and joy of my own friendships, I was eager to spend time with Davis’ book, reflecting on the power of women relationships. I ran across a handful of pleasant insights in The Friends We Keep, but I also found myself a bit disappointed by Davis’ exploration of friendship.

First, let me begin with all that Davis accomplishes.

The book is woven through with first person accounts told by an array of modern day women. I was drawn to the first person stories about the joys and disappointments other women experienced in friendship. Time and time again, I resonated with their accounts, able to identify a specific friend or two in my own life who had played the same role.

One of the more meaningful insights I took away from the book came in chapter one. Davis writes about the many archetypes of women friendships that exist in movies and books. Friendships like those found in Anne of Green Gables, The Big Chill, Beaches, and The Joy Luck Club. She writes, “We want to know that a true friendship can survive the years, the growing pains, and the inevitable changes we morph through, and that in the end it will become triumphantly stronger than ever.”

I fully embraced this truth as I reflected on my reunion with Havi. So much had changed between us in four years, and in some ways, I wondered if we would become friends meeting for the first time today. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Havi and I were able to not only step over the awkwardness of four years apart, but pour grace on the disappointments and hurts that may have accrued.

That weekend, one of the insights Davis captured in her book came true for me: “No one had to bring perfection to the friendship, only loyalty.”

Another meaningful insight I took away from The Friends We Keep, came in chapter six. Davis writes about “the age of friendship,” the period in our lives when our friendships are “richer, deeper … the center of our world.” She then goes on to explore the way in which those friendships change as we get married, have babies, and launch our careers.

Admittedly, the rules of friendship seem to change as we get older and this has always perplexed me. But Davis shed new light on this transition when she wrote, “In the tender first age of friendships, those girls were our lives, but in the second age, they are women who help us navigate what has actually become our lives.”

This was a revelation to me. Not just because she acknowledges the transformations I’ve struggled to understand, but also because she allowed me to see that intimacy does not preclude adult friendships, it simply takes another form.

While I deeply appreciated this and other insights on women friendships, more often than not, The Friends We Keep left me disappointed. Too often, I felt that Davis offered easy answers for a complex issue.

In her chapter, “Circle of Friends,” she writes, “Are women sometimes so jealous of each other that we are dishonest and manipulative? In the deepest recesses of our hearts, do we not always want the best, do we not want happiness and success, for our friends? Sadly, too often it seems that we do not.” I wrote in the margins of my book, “Friendships are so much more nuanced than this and complex!” My own friendship with Havi has proved this. While Havi and I have definitely hurt one another, it was not due to the catty behavior Davis touches on over and over again in her book. The history of our joys and wounds paints a subtler portrait of friendship.

For that reason, Davis’ reflection that women willingly sacrifice their friend’s happiness for their own sense of security and success did not ring true for me. It felt like an easy answer and one that submitted to a secular view of women. Yet it appeared over and over again in the chapters.

I came to the end of Davis’ book hungry to hear a solution to the perversions of women’s nature. What Davis offers as a solution for the healing and restoration of relationships is what she calls, “friendship with self.”

The book ends with an image of her holding a yoga pose in the shape of a tree. She writes that this yoga pose is, “my mediation and part of my practice of friendship with myself. Only then do I find the strength for friendship outside myself.”

There is certainly beauty in nurturing your own being in order to nurture those around you, but again, I struggled with the simplicity of this answer. It was hard for me to believe that the healing and redemption of women friendships rests primarily with my ability to be a friend to myself. After all, I have become a healthier woman in the years since Havi and I first met. I am perhaps a better friend to myself than I was in college, but I don’t believe that is the main reason Havi and I enjoyed our weekend together. I think it had more to do with the healing God has done in our lives these last four years.

Because of this healing, I found myself able to open my heart to my friend once again, resting in a love outside of myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when she did the same towards me. Between Havi and I there was a gentle understanding that things were not “all OK” but that we still chose one another and that one day there would be time to work through those hurts.

Christin Taylor lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband, Dwayne, her daughter, Noelle, and her son, Nathan. She runs The Blank Page Writing Workshops online, and her first book, Shipwrecked in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from Wesleyan Publishing House early 2012. To learn more about Christin, her workshops, and her writing go to www.christintaylor.com.