What is wrong with me? A vulnerable share about friendship

On the challenges and joys of making new friends later in life ✨With a special note from award-winning novelist Holly Ringland✨

When my children were very young I read an article about female friendship, which gushed about the unique blessing of small circles of besties, and interviewed a number of mothers who said they had only made it through those early years thanks to late night Whatsapps with ‘the girls’. I remember wondering what was wrong with me, that there I was in my early forties, not belonging to any such WhatsApp groups or having a tight knit group of girl friends to call my own. Later that same day, my youngest daughter came up to me, caught hold of my arm, looked up with big innocent eyes and asked, “Mummy, you have friends?”

We had moved back to my hometown when she was a few weeks old. I only knew a couple of people, and was worn thin with the dual demands of parenting small children and building a business. My mum lived round the corner and did all the toddler classes while I worked on my second book. I did have friends but most of them were people I had collected on my travels and various iterations of my life overseas, and they lived hundreds - if not thousands - of miles away. Even here in the UK, my husband and I have been itinerant, moving house once every three years or so ever since we met. It’s a strange habit we have, which is great for variety, not so great for building bonds, or staying in the lives of those we move away from.

My daughter’s question stung, not so much because of my lack of local friends - I had become numb to that - but more because I worried what I was modelling for her. I was a work-obsessed hermit and she could see it. I wondered whether that was how it would always be, whether I had reached an age where I had met my quota of potential friends and not done such a good job of making the most of them. Sometimes it made me sad but mostly I didn’t have time to think about it.

Not long after that we moved (again!) to Devon, near the sea where the community is strong, people have more time for each other and I am in a slightly different life phase. I am still slow to form friendships but am grateful for each one that has come into my life these past few years. I have also been stunned by the deep connections that have been forged through the world of writing, and I would love to go back and tell my younger doubting self that there is no need to worry, some very special people will soon arrive carrying armfuls of books and joy.

One of those people is

Holly Ringland

, who you might know as the award winning author of two of my favourite novels, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Holly isn’t local to me. She lives in Australia. But she friends like someone who lives down the road and getting to know her has been a revelation. I shared one of her books on social media about five years ago, and have recommended them many times over since. That led to us striking up a conversation via Instagram DMs, and last year, when she was heading back to her second home of Manchester she dropped me a friendly note suggesting we meet up for a coffee if I was ever in town.

We ended up meeting last August. It was the strangest thing – all week I had been horizontal on my hotel room floor, or hobbling around the city with terrible back pain, and could not sit for more than a few minutes. But then I met Holly in the bar at my hotel, ordered a mocktail, started snorting with laughter at one of the hilarious things she said, sat down and stayed there for hours, absolutely fine. I see this as evidence that Holly is a magical being. I would go so far as to say I was bedazzled by her, in that her light landed on me like a sticky jewel, and never left. It was the most joyous meeting, and soon after she came down to visit us in Devon. I’ll never forget watching her sitting on a deckchair holding up a beach pebble and explaining the essence of storytelling in the simplest, most beautiful of terms to my youngest daughter, who went straight back home, started writing and didn’t stop until months later when she held in her own small hands three hardback copies of her first book, which she got printed on Snapfish with her own money.

Holly has returned to Australia now, but we text often, marvelling at all kinds of coincidences and serendipitous overlaps that seem to happen in our lives, and I am so grateful, not just for our Whatsapp group of two but for her stories, her authenticity, her hilarity and magic and for her generosity as a human being. I want you to know her too, so I have invited her to share some words here with us today. As it happens, without knowing what I was going to write about to introduce her, she wrote us an essay called ‘The Language of Strangers’ – it’s a love letter to the weirdo in each of us, and it makes me wonder whether it isn’t those inner weirdos seeing and knowing each other that is the foundation of a true friendship, and the stories that we exchange weirdo to weirdo which bind us together.

Note: I am thrilled to announce that

Holly Ringland

will be one of three guest teachers on my upcoming seven-week live writing and Substack immersion Ink + Flame, where she will be teaching an extraordinary workshop about writing the things that burn in us. There are only a handful of spots left – you can snap one up here. Class starts Feb 24. As a subscriber you can use the code INKANDJOY to get 15% off when you register, while places remain.

As for making friends in later life, I’ll share what my mother told me in her last days, when I asked her for friendship advice. I remember, because I wrote it down. She said, We have different friends for different life stages, and different kinds of friendships in each one. Good friendship takes work. You have to keep up with it. Going for coffee. Calling them up. Spending time. There are some times in your life when you just don’t have as much time for that as you want. If you can make the time, great, but if you can’t, don’t worry too much. Just do the best you can. If it’s just you doing the work, it’s OK to let the friendship go. More friends will come. And right now you are in a really busy life stage. I want you to have as many lovely friends as you want, but I also want you to know that when the children are older and you have more time, different people will arrive and you will be glad for them. There is no rush.

How right she was.

By way of background, Holly came to Manchester to do an MA in Creative Writing in 2009, returning to Australia most years to see family. She went back for Christmas in 2019 to film the TV show Back to Nature* intending to be away a few weeks, but COVID hit, and she got busy with book promotion for her first book The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (which was turned into an Amazon Prime series featuring Sigourney Weaver!) and to writing The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, and then The House that Joy Built, and she didn’t return until last summer, five years later, to a house that had been frozen in time.

The Language of Strangers: a love letter to weirdos and our stories that connect us

by

Holly Ringland

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do.

– FRIDA KAHLO

Manchester is the red brick city where, from 2014 through until 2018, I imagined, developed and wrote my first novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. It’s where I’m writing this piece. Sitting once again at my northern desk, writing here for the first time since I wrote Alice Hart, reminds me in a visceral and present way of who I was and how I felt the last time I was here.

Before the publication of Lost Flowers in March 2018, my manuscript hung suspended in space, somewhere between being the FINAL.doc draft I emailed to my beloved publisher, and an actual book. With a spine. Bearing my name. Destined for bookshops’ shelves. And, possibly even more bewildering to me at the time, destined for readers.

Although I was ‘living the dream’ of becoming a published author, when it came to the event of publication, I was terrified of failing in every way imaginable: the book tanking, people hating it, hating me, misunderstanding it, misunderstanding me. Of being unfairly judged and criticised. Of being hurt. Of not being smart/good/strong enough to do justice to the privilege of being published. Of what my life might become now that I’d written a story that I’d spent most of my life too scared to write.

To cope, I started consuming wisdom from other authors, taking great comfort in knowing I wasn’t alone in feeling like I was about to go headfirst into free fall. That was when I rediscovered Frida Kahlo’s words about feeling strange.

Reading them, everything crystallised. What if Alice Hart, and I as her author, did find our readers, our strange kin? What if all the TED talks I’d watched and books on shame I’d read were true; what if, as Brené Brown says, vulnerability truly is the risk we have to take if we want to experience connection?

I remember I was asked in one of my first interviews as an author: ‘What do you wish you’d known before you wrote this novel?’ My answer was that I wish I’d known I was enough to do it. I wish I didn’t have such a tormented time with anxiety and self-doubt and fear, though I understand why these things ran so deep: my brain was trying to protect me from the unknown. The unknown is rarely safe.

There’s also another answer, a bigger, deeper answer about stories and connection and universal emotions: I wish I could have known for sure that Frida’s words are true; that the sore, strange place I was drawing darkness and beauty and magic from in my heart would connect with the sore, strange place and darkness and beauty and magic in others. That’s how our common humanity works; there is more that connects us than divides us.

Although I largely wrote Lost Flowers by convincing myself that no one other than me would ever read it, there were days at my desk when I couldn’t fool myself: I wanted my novel to find its people. I was driven by a deep, aching desire for connection. To use my voice. To roar like I used to on bushwalks as a child, yelling the Dharug word, cooee, out into the Australian bush, waiting with breath held to hear someone else, unknown and unseen to me but on the same track, in the same landscape, yell cooee back. I’m here. You’re not alone. It’s what I wanted to feel in my writing; it’s the feeling I wanted Alice and her story to give others.

Six and a half years after publication, now back at my Manchester desk, remembering the version of myself sitting here unpublished, suspended, and terrified of what might come, I understand the only way was through. I could not have prepared for the experience of connecting with readers, like the bookseller whose very first words to me were, ‘Just tell me, just tell me, is Alice okay now?’ Or the message I received after one of my events, about a vulnerable teenage girl who had come to see me speak, and later said I’d given her courage to keep writing: she was in therapy to reclaim her life after abuse and was using writing to help her take ownership of her story. Or the women in signing lines who met me and held my offered hands as tears rolled down their cheeks. We didn’t share why. We didn’t have to. The themes in Lost Flowers spoke for us. That’s what stories can do.

When I wrote my second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, the experience was markedly different - I knew throughout the process that it would be published. And yet, knowing that didn’t sedate my fears. They just levelled up, with new facets and faces, in a different way to my first time writing a book. (That’s the thing about fear, it grows and changes as we do.) The same thing happened with my third book, The House That Joy Built, which was my first work of non-fiction. Fear is always there, always trying to lower my risk of being vulnerable, and of writing and sharing my work with an open heart.

When I hear from readers who share with me what my books mean to them, it isn’t so much an elation of praise that moves me so - though of course it’s lovely to know when someone enjoys your work - it’s a deeper, more substantial feeling. It’s connection through story. It’s knowing that someone else out there loved reading a story - about love, mess, grief, joy, courage, myths, self-actualisation, self-compassion, compassion in general, and moments of humours that find us often in the most absurd moments - as much as I loved writing it. And that’s only through the power of vulnerability and letting ourselves been seen.

I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.

– FRIDA KAHLO

People often used to say to me that in publication my books would take on a life of their own, entirely separate to me. It was a truth that scared me, like a pre-emptive sense of loss, or scarcity. What’s actually happened has been even more overwhelming, and wonderful: my books have found their way into the hearts of readers around the world to whisper, or roar, cooee.

And readers have been kind, big-hearted and generous enough to roar cooee back at me. We’re here. We are strange and sore and hopeful, and we are not alone.

Notes:
*Back To Nature for ABC TV, co-hosed with Aaron Pedersen

Find out more about Holly here: Substack | Website

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Top/bottom photos: Holly Bobbins Photography