A love letter to her friends
jobs and in different cities over the years, plus a raft of university sisters for whom sisterhood is not a joke.
Their friendship is a rejection of every negative thing I’ve ever heard said about women and a balm for any bad thing that comes my way.
Text Me When You Get Home aims to offer some insight into this critical institution. Though not particularly political and written before #Metoo, the work feels fresh.
In the face of near-daily revelations of men at the highest levels of business and government treating women as disposable, Schaefer shows how stabilising and joyful it can be to connect to another woman.
The book isn’t perfect. Schaefer weighs it with her own biography, which provides the least lively and insightful material here.
She juxtaposes her experiences with her mother’s to make an unconvincing point that young women today care more about friendship than did previous generations.
Extrapolating such wide meaning from two women’s stories, without accounting for individual personalities and circumstances, doesn’t work; I could just as easily offer my own mom’s life to refute her point.
Where Text Me When You
Get Home proves liveliest is in tracing how popular culture has treated female friends and how the current cultural landscape is more hospitable than ever to the concept.
Schaefer’s interviews with screenwriters, producers and directors show how sexism infects the entertainment industry and how hard people have pushed back to create more true narratives about women and their friendships.
Mary Agnes Donoghue, the writer of the popular film Beaches, revealed to Schaefer that her vision of a movie that showed the power of female friends clashed with director Garry Marshall’s vision.
He wanted a cat fight. (Schaefer includes some fascinating history about the cat fight as a concept – it was first used to describe scuffles between Mormon wives in 1854 and later became a staple of pornography.)
Marshall wanted the women in the film to end their friendship over a guy; Donoghue insisted that was silly – women’s big fights weren’t over men.
A writer’s strike helped save Donoghue’s idea. No one was available for a rewrite and Beaches went on to resonate with millions of women.
Meanwhile, other modern shows discreetly made female friendships their cornerstone.
The real relationship of
Grey’s Anatomy was not the romance between Meredith and neurosurgeon Derek, but the friendship between Meredith and her fellow intern Cristina.
Schaefer demonstrates how professionally productive female friendship can be (which feels particularly relevant as #Metoo has highlighted some of the pitfalls of the workplace for women), citing the female friends who created the nut-butter brand Wild Friends, the news digest the Skimm and the razor-sharp fashion website Go Fug Yourself.
Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon’s real-life friendship led to the creation of HBO’S hit series Big Little Lies.
As co-producers and future co-stars of the show, they pitched it together to execs and sparked a bidding war.
“It was kind of amazing to feel the interest – that’s what happens when women combine their powers,” Kidman told Vogue.
“If I’d gone by myself to try do it, it wouldn’t have worked.”
Central to the book is the idea that friendship is assigned little importance. As more women marry later (the median age of first marriage for women stayed between 20 and 22 for 100 years but is now around 27), being single is the norm for women in their mid20s to mid-30s, and friends occupy the perch traditionally reserved for a romantic partner.
But the wider culture hasn’t quite caught up. On forms to list beneficiaries for life insurance, “there’s not a box for friend”, as Aminatou Sow, host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, tells Schaefer.
“There has been a tacit, depressing assumption that our friendships, unlike our other relationships, should be temporary… that at some point we will have to distance ourselves from each other,” Schaefer writes.
“But we’re pressing back on this notion. We’re caring for each other – loudly and continuously for no reason besides wanting to. The women around us are essential.”
We need our friends. Schaefer cites research showing that the traditional fight-or-flight response to stress doesn’t manifest in women the same way it does in men; rather, women demonstrate a “tend and befriend” response.
In one of many animal studies with similar findings, male rats froze under stress, while the females climbed into the same cage and groomed and licked each other.
Though we prefer texting to licking, I was stunned by how closely this describes how my friends and I rally to each other in tough moments.
It’s often observed that women’s friendships are deeper than men’s. Perhaps that’s because of how women communicate, or because men aren’t raised to have intimacy in their relationships with other men.
But being female in a maledominated world creates its own kind of stress, and teaming up with our own is one way to stay sane.
When women are so often undercut or underpaid, told we’re too fat or bad negotiators or apologising too much or doing whatever we’re lately accused of, it’s not just good friendship to rely on each other. It’s good sense. – Washington Post.