The Friend That Got Away

And the complexities of female friendship.

“How have you been, old friend? Still chasing those big dreams?”

The Instagram message came through after my first novel came out in 2020. At first, I was excited to see the name of my friend Charlotte pop up in my inbox. We worked together in magazines when were in our twenties, and our friendship was based on complaining about how hard it was to get ahead, how inadequate we felt at times, how hard it was to speak up in meetings. But as time went on, I’d realized something else, too. Talking to her didn’t always make me feel better. Sometimes I left those dinner dates feeling worse. A natural distance developed when I moved to New York. We both got married, and we lost touch.

Still, I didn’t ignore Charlotte’s message when I received it in 2020. I wrote her back right away, and it would take me weeks before I realized that it wasn’t my best decision.

The friend that got away might leave a hole in your heart — but that doesn’t always mean you should invite them back in.

She was the friend that got away, a boomerang friend suddenly back in my life. A term typically reserved to describe the on again/off again romantic relationship, the boomerang friendship can be equally toxic. Boomerang friends aren’t people who you lose touch with and then feel delighted you ran into them at the market. They’re not people who you’re too busy to see. They’re the friends that you parted ways with only to have them pop up in your life on repeat, sometimes wanted, sometimes not so much.

In my novel, All the Summers in Between, I write about two friends named Thea and Margot who are extremely close at age twenty. But after unexpected tragedy strikes, they grow estranged for ten years while keeping a dark secret between them. In 1977, Margot quite literally sails back into Thea’s life, and the women are forced to reckon with their complicated history—and a universal question: Are some friends meant to remain in the past?

The answer to this has a lot to do with the friend that you’ve left behind.

Now back to Charlotte. Days after my friend first reached out to me on Instagram, we engaged in a steady ping-pong of messages about our lives. Where she was working, who she was dating, if she’d talked to anyone else we had in common. We made plans to meet up after the pandemic lifted. I was suddenly telling her how great she seemed, how proud I was of her, and then I started doing that thing where I built her up to feel so much bigger than me.

It was okay, I thought. I’d missed her, and I was nostalgic for our twenties. How much fun we used to have walking around Capitol Hill gossiping about boyfriends and trying on clothes or talking about books. When a little voice inside my head tried to remind me that she’d once made fun of my flat chest, I ignored it. Or that years ago, when she suggested that I was only promoted because my male boss had a crush on me, I’d gone home and cried.

Charlotte had changed, I told myself.

Then I sensed another familiar pattern: We were grown women now, and even still, while I always asked questions about Charlotte’s life, she rarely asked about mine.  When she did say something, it was typically a sarcastic take about something positive in my life. That’s when I realized: With a boomerang friend, there’s often a reason we ended the relationship in the first place.

While people may change careers or cities or partners, they never really change themselves. Charlotte was as self-absorbed as she’d been in her twenties, and as a busy mom, I didn’t have times to boost her self-esteem all the time. 

My forties have given me a different view of friendship. I don’t need to spend time with other women to keep me from feeling lonely. I spend time with people who want to talk about books or try new restaurants or gripe about what our husbands are doing and not doing, what we’re worried about when it comes to our kids.

Old friends stir something inside of us, even if they’re imperfect ones. We slide into those old feelings of being restless and young. But I’m here to say that if you’ve left behind a friend at one point in your life, it’s probably a reason not to invite them back in.

**All names have been changed to protect the identity of friends mentioned.

My third novel All the Summers in Between is a dual-timeline historical fiction novel that examines a complex and (sometimes toxic!!) friendship in 1967 and 1977.