Author Megan Nicol Reed has released her second book, Other People's Bodies. Photo / Babiche Martens
After a lifetime of navigating friendships, bestselling author Megan Nicol Reed reflects on how to deal when the people you love tumble down a rabbit hole.
We were poles apart. She with her mascaraed lashes, milky smooth skin, and breasts that bounced in their trainer bra on the netball court. Me puppy chubby, red hair chopped unflatteringly short, a rash of pimples across my nose the only outward sign of puberty. I watched on from the sidelines, last to be picked again. I was all alone at a big new school and I clutched at the friendship she offered up. Clung to it despite her derision when I joined the feminist club. Clung to it despite the competitiveness which would drive her to steal my notes before a test, to knock my art project off the windowsill on which it lay drying. Clung to it despite the devout Catholic parents who forbade her to take a bath or a shower at mine for fear my lesbian mother should see her naked. She made my life hell and I’m not sure I even liked her, but I was desperate. BFFs 4 EVA!
It ended in tears.
Four decades have since passed. Cushioned by a long, largely happy marriage, for the most part fulfilled by the distractions of children and work, I am less needy now and choose my friends differently.
Security has afforded me wariness. To only keep company that thinks like you is to live in a silo, but if I know you to be a bigot, to talk about others behind their back with ill intent, then even though we might exchange warm-ish greetings when we cross paths at our mutual friend’s annual Xmas bash, I will keep you at arm’s length. Probably the feeling is reciprocal. Probably my monthly Green Party donation irks you. Probably being on the receiving end of one of the friendly interrogations I am known for, gets your goat.
Oh well.
I will be 52 in a few months and most of my friendships are long formed. Ten, 20, 30, 35 years ago: enough water under the bridge to trust you really know a person, if not inside out, then at least in the ways that matter, the essence of them. We’ve shared beds, boyfriends, you danced at my wedding, I cried at your husband’s funeral, we’ve held each other’s hair while we vomited, and told one another, “You’re still hot!” through pregnancy and menopause, alopecia and mastectomy. Mostly we move in similar ways through the world, view things through a similar lens. Mostly we rub alongside one another with minimal friction.
Mostly…
But people can change. People do change. We are not leopards or tigers, not spotted or striped, we are not old dogs, we do have the odd new trick. We can go from a mild scepticism about antibiotics to wearing a hat made from tin foil.
While it is confronting when that new friend from work, the one you were trying on for size, drunkenly calls the Middle Eastern Uber driver who takes you down the wrong street a “towel head”, it’s another matter entirely when the friend you’ve known since university, whose couch you dossed on in Clapham, is suddenly living their best life camped out in front of the Beehive, holding a placard proclaiming Jacinda is Satan’s envoy on Earth.
Recent events have polarised society in ways that felt unimaginable a decade ago. We have seen people falling down rabbit holes we hadn’t even known were there to fall down. Through divisive rhetoric and incendiary content, populist politicians and social media echo chambers have turned healthy debate into a battleground, pitting us against each other in an attempt to sow deep distrust and dislike. A polarised society is dangerous, polarisation between friends is devastating. As a writer, I’m interested in how personal actions can influence the bigger picture and, conversely, how the political landscape can sway the smallest decisions.
Like my first novel, One of Those Mothers, Other People’s Bodies is centred on a friendship between women – all of their tendernesses and small brutalities – and like the former it is preoccupied with how a set of thoughts might take hold of a community and poison it. Fomented in the aftermath of Covid, I wanted to explore how an idea can behave like a virus, infecting people one by one, connecting the formerly disparate to one another.
I wanted to explore what happens when you realise that kindred spirit is not only not on the same page as you, they’re not even reading from the same book. When seemingly overnight your apolitical, endearingly woo-woo friend morphs into a warmongering, climate change-denying Trump-lover.
That young me, such a mixed bag of insecurity and pomposity, who couldn’t tell a friend how I really felt yet would pick a fight on a Friday night in Queen St with the born-again Christians, has learnt that civility is more useful than stridency. That someone who bangs on relentlessly is boring and repugnant whatever side they sit on. That with time most rifts will, if not heal, then at least blur. That we should approach each other with open hearts and good intentions, handling one another gently and calmly. That what is true for me may not be true for you and maybe that’s okay. Cos actually it has to be. There is much at stake.
Other People’s Bodies (Allen and Unwin) is out now, RRP$36.99.