As an older woman looking back on female friendships, I’ve come to understand the importance of connection. I’ve learned friendship is about the willingness to open your heart to other women and, in turn, to accept their open hearts. This became even more apparent to me during the early days of the Covid pandemic. What sustained me through those challenging months were my female friends. I reached out to women who understood friendship as the glue holding our world together.

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I wrote the first draft of What a Trip in 2019 and put the finishing touches on the story during the early days of the pandemic. What a Trip takes readers back in time to the late 1960s and the Vietnam War era. Through Fiona, the novel’s protagonist, we relive the antiwar movement and the culture of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. It’s a coming-of-age story and what it meant to be a young woman during those turbulent years.

As I read, reread, edited, and edited some more, I began thinking about the value of female friendship, a major theme in the novel.

My thoughts took me back to Cecelia. She and I bonded during our high school’s junior class play, my one failed attempt at acting and her one failed attempt at costume design. The play was secondary to our connection. Together, we shared the joys and challenges of our teenage years.

I left for college; she enrolled at our local community college. Our friendship continued until New Year’s Eve of my senior year. While driving home from a party, our car was rear-ended by a drunk driver. I survived; she didn’t.

Best friends are supposed to last a lifetime. Mine had been taken from me when I was only twenty-one. I often wonder if our friendship would have endured into adulthood. Would we have been in each other’s wedding? Become godmother to each other’s babies? Bought homes on the same block?

Something shut down in me after the accident. I knew I could never give my soul to another woman after losing one so close. I turned away from developing close friendships and my dream of becoming a writer and college professor.

Instead, I became a bartender, which satisfied my need for socialization and provided a place to hide from myself and others. I could be kind and friendly to my customers and remain free of entanglement. The bar between us kept me safe.

Years of therapy led me out of a string of dead-end bartending jobs, and into the world of self-employment. I became a massage therapist, a career that allowed me to be helpful and friendly to my clients while keeping a professional boundary between us.

Being a massage therapist wasn’t enough. As I entered my early thirties, I set a goal of becoming financially independent before the age of fifty and opened a private post-secondary vocational school. Entering the business world later in life, I knew I needed to make sacrifices to achieve my target.

For me, those sacrifices meant I continued to turn away from close friendships and instead turned toward colleagues. I reached out to women like me: women who had come of age during the early years of the women’s movement in the 1970s; women who put their careers above all else. We supported one another and shared a drive to succeed. What we forfeited was our humanity.

I’m proud of my achievements and proud to have been a successful business owner. But wasn’t enough. I longed for that special female friend I could call in an emergency, someone who would share my joys and sorrows and accept me unconditionally. Most of all, I longed for the woman who’d call me her best friend, the one for whom I’d drop everything to come to her rescue.

We made great strides as women in business, but because we lacked personal connections, once our professional relationships ended, my colleagues drifted away. I learned that a colleague is different from a friend. My colleagues were scattered across the country, so I knew we’d never have that unconditional, drop-everything relationship. But what I didn’t realize is that I was only of value to many of them because of my business.

As I gradually eased out of career mode, I was determined to become someone worthy of friendship. My conversations became more personal. Once women saw I wanted to know about them as people, they wanted to know who I was. Finally, I’d become a person, someone worthy of friend status. Could I fill the role?

My husband and I moved to a new community with new opportunities for friendship. Neighbors welcomed me and invited me to share in town projects and events. We joined a group that met monthly for potluck dinners. Most women were eager for friendship. We shared our social and political points of view. Our conversations inspired me.

I searched for other groups that shared my interests. I was invited to become a member of our town’s library board of trustees. From there I became president of the Friends of the Library.

Friends of the Library: the name alone brought a smile to my face. I was ready to make a difference in my community and in my life. With a common purpose of hosting cultural and educational programs, I bonded with the women in our group. My new friendships gave me hope and lifted me from the void I’d felt for so many years.

Through my work at the library, I formed a memoir writers group composed of eight older women. At each of our monthly meetings, we shared a story from our life. We formed a community and bonded through our memories.

Three of our members were born during the Depression. They shared stories about their struggles, marriages, family, careers, and history. The rest of the world may see these nonagenarians as women fading into the shadows. I see brave, talented, inspired, educated human beings—strong women I am proud to call my friends.

In November 2020 I joined a group of four forty-something women writers looking for support and encouragement during National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). We met weekly on Zoom and began discussing the value of friendship in our days of isolation. We came up with exercises and themes for short stories and essays. Then we turned our attention to female friendships, noting our friendships gave us something to look forward to and, in fact, kept us sane.

We challenged each other to write short pieces on friendship. From disastrous teenage friendships to first loves to bridezillas, we shared the joys and trials of women we’d known, loved, and lost.

Over the next year, we revised our stories and invited other women writers to create an anthology of essays on female friendship. Our meetings went from virtual to face-to-face as our vision of the project took shape. Our writing and diverse backgrounds brought us together. Through sharing food, wine, and personal stories, we came to cherish our time together as friends.

Reflecting on friendships lost, friendships gained, and friendships maintained, I’ve learned the importance of building community, and sharing common interests, food, and wine. I’ve learned age, geography, career, and social status have little to do with what makes a friend. My life is richer now than ever before.

what a trip novel susen edwards

What a Trip will be published November 15 and is available from Amazon and Bookshop.