Nina: Welcome back to Dear Nina, conversations about Friendship.

I have author Christie Tate back on the show. I have been so eager for this conversation. We are talking about friendship triangles, envy, jealousy, and competition. You might know Christie as the author of the Fantastic Memoir Group, how One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life. It was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon book Club pick.

You might know her from a previous episode of this podcast where we talked about revealing too much too soon with new friends, and that was episode four. If you wanna go look for it.

I asked Christie to come back because she has a new memoir out called B F F A, memoir of Friendship Lost and Found. And I have been bursting to talk to people about it, . . Before we talk about triangles, envy, jealousy, and competition, all the topics I promised, I think I can let Kristy get a word in. Welcome, Kris.

Christie: Hi, Nina. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be back with.

Nina: I would love for you to give people an overview in your words, and then maybe I’ll give an overview in my words and we’ll see if we

describe it

Christie: good. , dueling banjos. so I had the experience that I spent a lot of my late teens, all of my twenties, in a big. Part of my thirties really focused on getting myself straightened out romantically. It took a really long time while I was doing that. Friendships were on the back burner. They were like my emergency calls when the boy broke up with me.

But I didn’t really focus on them or put a ton of energy into them. when I finally settled down with my now husband, all of a sudden I looked around and I realized that I had as much work to do on my friend. that I had done to get him in my life as my healthy partner. And I knew that there were lots of ghosts and

I, I would refer to my life as a friendship graveyard I’d been very careless, very hot and cold, and I wanted to work on that. the time was ripe at the ripe old age of 35. So it’s never too late. It’s something I want readers to know.

Nina: From the reader point of view, they’re introduced to the story through your friend Meredith.

Can you explain a little bit about that?

Christie: Sure. What happened was right when. Settled down. This woman in this 12 step program that I went to every week, I’d known her for years. She was not really on my radar, as a friend. She was a nice lady in a recovery program. And she tapped me on the shoulder and she said, well, now that you have settled down and maybe found your person, now it’s time to work on friendship.

And I was offended and afraid, but inside when she said that, it rang like a gong. And she offered to work on friendships with me, She had just settled down too.

She wanted to work on her friendships. , we both had the idea that we sort of sucked at friendship and wished we were better and well too bad we sort of suck at this. And she’s like, I think we need to change the narrat. And the book is about how together, shoulder to shoulder we worked on the lies that we told ourselves, our bad habits, our childhood traumas that were impacting our ability to bond with other women.

And we just went real deep. Just two amateur lady friends, working on friendship and it changed my life.

Nina: I underlined so many quotes and I really had to control myself to what I wanted to bring here, but I have one appropriate for. This moment. I appreciated you pointing out in the book that women almost don’t have a chance to do friendship successfully from the get-go. It’s like we all really have so much to work on and we had to push ourselves past that.

And you wrote that after having your daughter, and these are your words now. I was carrying around a baby girl and listening to strangers, colleagues, friends, and family members project their fantasies of difficulty and drama onto her tiny fetal head. I felt compassion for all of us. Before we take our first breath, we are all written to a script about our difficult personalities, our emotional volatility, our fraught relationships, our propensity for so-called drama.

Christie: I am getting heated thinking about it cuz I remember that, before my daughter even took her first breath. Everyone was talking about the drama, the middle school, the friends, Interestingly, reality sort of reflects some of that. But is that because we’re telling girls since before they can breathe that this is gonna be hard and you’re gonna be nasty to each other and that is not helping any of these girls navigate tricky, dynamic, rich areas of friend. , I think it’s shunting girls into bad habits and locking them into this narrative. When we need to give them more space, we need to give it to ourselves and to them.

Nina: And a lot of grace for the feelings we’re gonna talk about today, like envy, jealousy, this, this sense of competition instead of denying they exist. What I loved about your book is like you are talking about things we all feel. and

we do all have issues with feeling envious, jealous, and we’re gonna separate those in a second. We feel that we are in competition with people, but to pretend we don’t doesn’t help. So it’s right, like naming it really helps. Let’s separate jealousy and envy for a second. .

Christie: Yes. So jealousy is if there’s a triangle. , if I’m jealous that my husband is flirting with Nina, I’m jealous of Nina. . But if I’m just jealous that Nina is perky and has this podcast and is just knows herself and is big and expansive as a person in the world, then I’m envious of her and my whole life really, until I wrote this book and had to nail down the language.

I just like the word jealousy. , I’ve always used it. It’s green. We know more about it, but really what I’ve struggled the most with is envy. wishing to have the great things that seem to go effortlessly to my women friends. That’s envy. That’s my understanding.

Nina: I understand it that way too and I think actually both come up in the book a lot cuz in the Friendship Triangle stuff, and that really does. Several times. That’s more the jealousy, but there is envy It’s funny the way you described me, which is slightly off topic, but it actually does make me think of an envious thing.

I’m not saying you were envious of it, but, listeners might know who follow me on Instagram that I was in Palm Springs with Christie, who was leading, uh, writing retreat and I was really just a participant. but because I lead writing groups myself in Minneapolis, it’s sometimes hard to just sit back like it is and you describe me.

You know, a big kind of personality, and I am. but I actually feel envious of people who can just sit back and zip it. I really do like, isn’t that funny? I have to , Really control myself, not even just in that situation, because I’m also a teacher, in a lot of situations. I mean, I had to really self-talk and be like, , you don’t have to jump in every two seconds,

, it’s like a constant voice reminding me how to exist in the world,

Christie: Yes.

Nina: , and that’s not about competition, that’s more just me, I guess, wanting to be liked, you know? I have, that’s like my thing.

Christie: Yeah.

Nina: people to think I’m pushy, and so I have a lot to say, but I have to, that’s why I have a podcast, so I have somewhere to channel it.

Christie: well, I’m not a real zipper person either, as you might have guessed. I think it’s not an accident that I really love teaching, because you kind of get to hog the mic. I enjoy the mic. , it’s not subtle

Nina: . Well, me too. And so when I see other people who just quietly wait their turn and then when they do talk, I could even think of a couple people in our group. They’re so smart. And then when they do say something, it’s so profound and I’m like, God, that must be nice to just say the really sharp things and cut out , the stuff you don’t need.

And I’m envious of those people. So that’s that jealousy, that’s envy. And you know, what can you do? I’m 46 years old. I’m not gonna become a totally different person. . okay, so back to. Dealing with real feelings, real jealousy, real envy, and the triangles.

Because somebody in my Facebook group asked me at one point, maybe a couple months ago to have an episode about triangles. And then reading your book, it was the perfect time. you start with, even back when you tried out for cheerleading,

which you really, really wanted, you really wanted to make it.

And then I thought this part was. Honest, , it’s so subtle, but I hadn’t read anything quite like it. And as I’ve told Christie 800 times in Palm Springs, I read every book there is to have read about friendship and her book. It just has so original and I know that every listener is really gonna get a lot out of it.

So this little moment about the cheerleading was, well, you, you talk about it. I like, we’ll give you a chance

Christie: Uh, yeah, . So I had a best friend. This is in Texas, so cheerleading is really, really important. Being a junior high cheerleader, we didn’t have middle school, we had junior high, so you try out at the end of seventh grade, so you can be an eighth grade cheerleader and. . We were so intense. We paired off in September and tryouts were in April.

And my best friend paired up with someone else she had other friends, but I was so threatened that they were gonna go get friendship rings while they were practicing their herkes. And I was really undone about it. Like, I would listen to them talk about that when they were gonna get together to work on their routines and, and meanwhile, I had a wonderful cheer.

Partner as well who I really, genuinely loved so much, but I just wanted to be everybody’s number one, especially my super, super BFF. It was one of those things where if they had any tension between them, I would feel so happy. Like I just felt safer. , oh, oh,

something went down when they were working on their spread eagles and they were mad at each other or something. I was gleeful, truly gleeful because that’s how insecure I was. And then it turns out I made cheer. , my partner made cheerleader and my B f F and her partner didn’t make it, which I’d never considered.

And then I didn’t wanna be a cheerleader cuz I didn’t want her to not like me cuz I did make it and leading up to it, my fear was they would make it and I wouldn’t, I would be her sidelined friend and the whole thing was just preposterous and so fraught with scarcity and it’s gonna go away if, if I don’t line up exactly.

This thing, this friend, this friendship will go away forever. And I was beside myself.

Nina: It was the perfect example cuz I think this even happens in adult life, like right now. This idea that if two people have an experience together, even. One weekend or something , we do. We have this fear that they’re gonna bond more. And so then you talked about in the book how then you were worried that the two of them who weren’t on the squad anymore would also bond.

That they would bond not being cheerleaders.

Christie: Yes. The triangle thing is so real and I see them everywhere, right? There’s this group of moms, there’s three of us, and They both have one child, I have two, and I’m like, oh my God. Oh my God. They just have more in common. They have one daughter the same age, they’re doing all the same activities. I’m running around to , all kinds of things. And I feel I’ve gotten over it, but I had to have a process.

I’m 49 years old. I had to have a process about it, and it still feels a little tender. It’s just a little.

Nina: Yeah. And we’re gonna get to the process cause I think we need to help listeners. , another example Then Emily and Marni and I bring these up just cuz not everyone will have read it yet. And I just want people to be able to relate and get So that was more like in your thirties or twenties?

Christie: Oh yeah. That was my thirties .

Nina: No,

Christie: had

Nina: it’s, I could give you examples today for myself, so don’t worry.

Christie: Yeah, like that one was so painful. And the thing about me personally with triangles, triangles exist, there’s a reason why if you say the word triangle to a woman, she’s like, mm, not good, not a good configuration. And everybody knows that. It’s a real dicey shape.

When Meredith and I began our excavation, I knew I was gonna be dropping the pin right in the center of Christie, Marni and Emily because I made such a fool of myself, and I could not stop. I would call Marni and she would tell me, oh, I’m on the other line with Emily, and I would be, She shot my dog.

I would get off the phone. My lips would quiver hot tears, they both try to call me back. I’m not answering, you didn’t pick me. And I was a grown woman. I was a practicing lawyer. I had a mortgage and this is how I was acting and I could not stop. It was so painful, what I discovered in the excavation that was empowering for me.

I am very susceptible to creating stories in my head that I’m different and therefore I’m a loser and I’m gonna get kicked out of the triangle. Right? So again, just like the moms of single kids with Marnie and Emily, they were both married. I was out there dating and online and acting a fool there too.

They were both married. They both had a lot of resources. They didn’t have bosses, they didn’t have to do all the things I did, , I decided that made. Depreciated that, that was a diminishment. They were better than me obviously. And I was always like dog paddling to keep up with them in my mind.

Some of that I created and I brought to this scenario, maybe not all of it, but enough that there’s a piece for me to look at and control around the narratives and what I tell myself and being a victim, and instead of just making it explicit, it’s so painful when. Get off the phone with me to talk to Marni or, or whatever.

If I could just say it instead of all the shenanigans to hide it, which didn’t work. PS . But that was really, really embarrassing.

Nina: because even if you said it, , I’m thinking like if someone had written me a letter, because I get a lot of anonymous letters, if somebody had written me a letter and said, my friend doesn’t like it when I’m on the phone with my other friend. Right? Like, what would we tell that person?

We would tell them, well, you can, maybe the nicest thing would say, be like, I’m, I appreciate knowing you, feel that way, but she’s, no one’s gonna promise, right. To not

talk to

the other friend of.

Christie: Yes.

Nina: And, one thing you said in the book, I thought, was just so self-aware is that you realized that you were demanding assurance from your friends.

You can only do that for so long. Like at a certain point people tire out of that.

Christie: Yeah, that was the thing they were assuring me. The fact of the matter is they had a lot more free time. I worked downtown, I had billable hours, they had much more flexibility and just totally different day lives than I and night lives actually.

They were really good friends to me. And at some point it’s like the buck stops with me Emily would seriously tell. and she was so patient with me, Christie, after my husband and my kid, it’s you not in, in exclusion to Marni. Marni was probably there too, but she was very rightly keeping the focus on her and I how much planer could she have possibly made it to me it was my limitation and immaturity.

. I really had to grow and learn how to trust my friends, that was part of the work that was making the triangle so unmanageable. I didn’t trust, I didn’t take them at their word. Even though they were trustworthy people, that all comes right back to me. That was my work to do.

Nina: the whole book is, is you acknowledging that, which I love it. I think, first of all, Meredith brought up such a, great point. I have so many quotes from Meredith, , but just in my own words, she points out. A few times this comes up that we all have patterns and that certain relationship issues just keep coming up again and again.

So it was the cheerleading and then Emily and Marni, and you didn’t really have a chance to solve the triangle issue for yourself with Emily and Marni because they had a friendship breakup. Right. So it’s like the, the issue kind of dissolved for you before you actually got to. , do it yourself, which is why, you know, it probably comes up again, , later with, you know, other people in the book because , if you think about what Meredith said, these issues come up again.

And I believe that too. As a spiritual person, like certain relationships, I think, come into our life in different forms until we learn to solve that issue. And it could be romantic, friendship, family, it doesn’t matter. We, run into these same issues of triangles and jealousy and envy and compet.

Christie: It is super ironic that Meredith was always telling me it’s a cycle. You’ll get a chance to, you’ll get a chance to have this exact same situation and act differently. And I would think to myself, yeah, really. And then it turns out it was with her and myreen me of all frenemies. And I am still so humbled.

that , whatever work that Meredith and I had done, I did get my chance to do it again. And what I saw, kind of what you were saying a minute ago earlier about how, , once I hit a certain age, am I really gonna change? But when , Meredith was ill. This isn’t a spoiler in the prologue, you know, she doesn’t make it, but, , when Meredith was sick, I knew it was gonna be a problem cuz there were lots of potential triangles. Like who was gonna get the information, who was gonna be in her inner circle when she’s very, very sick.

Cuz of course I wanted to be there and I didn’t want anyone else to be there, that was my, my first impulse. But very close next to that running parallel to that. , my love for Meredith and wanting her to have what she needed and that trust that I didn’t have with Marni and Emily, I was able to have it years later, with Anna and Meredith and.

This woman who I, I struggled mightily with was the one to call me and tell me that Meredith had passed away. And I just felt nothing but love. And I was so afraid that when that happened, I would just be too busy being jealous. Like, why didn’t I get the memo first?

Or whatever. And I didn’t have that. It was pure.

Nina: I love that you got to that moment. I don’t wanna skip over Anna because Anna is such a good example of envy and she’s just one person, but I feel like we all probably have an. And, I’m gonna read one thing you wrote about her. You said, my envy of all things Anna waxed and waned. Sometimes I could hardly sit still because I was busy wishing I had a body the same shape as hers at her high up kitchen table.

I sometimes regressed to little Christie back at the dinner table in Texas, pining to switch places with Virginia. Who’s your sister in the book? Like Virginia, Anna seemed to glow with beauty and grace I noticed, and I compared myself to her before, during, or after each session. How did she get her hair so shiny?

Why were her baseboards always spotless? , how come? After our meetings, she had twice as many missed calls from friends as I did. My envy, a secret stash. I managed by ignoring it or sometimes hinting at it with John . Didn’t threaten the relationship. It sat next to me while we wrote like a gun on safety.

I like starred that and underlined it and circled it.

Christie: Anna is a really good person. People really love. her I really loved her and so did my friends. she was good. She was goodness. , it felt much more complicated to me to be jealous of a person. I guess I was envious.

Look, I did it again. To

Nina: It’s hard. Well, we use them, so interchange.

Christie: Yes. To be so, undo. emotionally by someone who was just a good person, a good friend to me who was just living her life. And I’m secretly in the corner, like a hamster on a wheel with , my rabid envy of, everything about her. It’s like she touched it and it would be like, You know, Mary Pop, birds would sing and

I mean, she is great and wonderful and also I was bringing a lot of delusional black and white distorted thinking into the relationship, which eventually did get in the way. , it’s not true that I was able to just hide that and just hope that went away and the relationship would not suffer.

That is not how it worked.

Nina: Well, maybe if we admitted those things, kind of like we were saying earlier about even just , the self-consciousness of knowing two friends are spending time together. I wonder. , as we think about solutions to this kind of stuff, maybe things wouldn’t get so out of hand and friendships wouldn’t have to end necessarily.

If we could just say, it’s hard to say I find myself so envious of you, so if I sometimes don’t ask about your trip, or I, you know, it’s, it’s not cause I don’t care. I’m probably just dealing with my own, I mean, I don’t even know how you would say that, but

I’m thinking out.

Christie: that is so interesting that you say that. I do think the power of naming it would really take some of the poison out of this. I’m thinking, has anyone ever said that to me? I one time had a friend say to me, I guess it was a triangle, but.

, one of the triangle legs was a man, and the other two of us were going off for the weekend to do a fun, fabulous thing. And he was just , super straightforward. He was like, I’m so jealous. , why didn’t I get invited? And we were like, it’s a girls’ weekend.

, what are you talking about? And he was genuinely pouty about it. , it’s interesting that my, one example of that is a. Who was just, I mean, he probably felt entitled to come. So that’s a whole nother story. But I would love to channel some of that. Direct energy and , just name it.

I’m not asking anybody to do anything differently. I just need to say , your two families going to Cancun, and I’m here , , I feel really, really jealous.

Nina: , maybe we just need to say that sometimes, what would someone say? They’d probably say, oh, we’re gonna miss you so much. , we’re gonna FaceTime you or something. And then it would be dumb. I don’t know. To pretend like the trip isn’t happening or

pretend you don’t know about it.

Oh, that’s like a whole nother episode

about trip. Well, the trips without you. , that’s a hard one.

Christie: yeah. You need to do a couple of trip e episodes,

Nina: Oh yeah. Traveling with friends and, and all

people. And not being invited. Those are actually two separate topics, right? , , back to the kind of it girl concept, , I think everybody has an Anna that we feel in competition with, but, and they’re not in competition with us.

That’s always the funny thing. , it’s imagined competition. , I’ve told my kids before, . It doesn’t matter what school you’re at, there’s a couple kids who are the kids and sometimes people hate them. unfortunately, when you’re way up on top , there’s only one way to go after that.

People wish for your demise. They do. People wish for the demise of the IT girl, the IT guy, and that person sort. Painted as , oh, they’re a mean girl. Or they’re a jerk because let’s say I’m talking even as young as like fifth grade, fourth grade, everybody wants to sit next to so-and-so at lunch.

Well, so-and-so only has two sides of their body. Okay, so that person, let’s say that day, chose friend A and friend B. Well, friend C is angry I almost feel sometimes for that person , they sort of can do no right, because someone’s gonna be left out, someone’s gonna go home and tell their mom. So-and-so didn’t sit next to me at lunch. So-and-so wouldn’t sit next to me on the field trip.

There’s one seat on the bus next to that person. That is it. That person cannot please everybody.

Christie: . I probably could not have written this book until I had children who were sort of hitting middle school and I could really. Have that extra lens about my own shenanigans in middle school. , when I would hear my kids come home and talk about, you know, the IT kids, it’s so clear to me.

It’s a system, a whole system creates it. Kids and hangers on and opt outers and the popular kid just wears a crown. that they didn’t necessarily even seek any more than anyone else did. I mean, I think we all kind of want the crown, you know? , so when I think about systems that create ins and outs and all the different permutations of that, that helped me realize my friendship story started way, way, way before I ever hit the cafeteria.

It started back home. The original triangle of my life is my mother and my. I guess my mom, my dad and me, but mostly my mother and my sister and , I could not imagine any other scenario than that. I was the weak leg, the not as good, and I just brought that forward to every cafeteria table I sat at, and naturally it didn’t go that great.

Not for any sustained amount of time.

Nina: kind of back to the assurance thing, like people get tired of probably having to assure the third

Christie: Yes. Oh my God. It’s exhausting. I mean, I do see another triangle. There’s a friend. . And she was very threatened by my having a baby and she thought she was gonna lose me to the baby. And that was a triangle where I not in the diminish, I was in the reassure role.

Well, I ghosted, so I obviously don’t love the reassure like after all the years that my friends prompt me up. You know, I had to do it for like six weeks and I was like, bye . So,

Nina: Well, you were a little older then. I think it, you could only do that so much. It would be natural to, get tired of it. I’m glad you brought up your mother and sister. We won’t talk about it much. People really should read about it in the book, but I think that answers one of my questions for you, which was going to be and still is, , how can people feel more confident?

A triangle, not sort of demand assurance from their friends, not maybe be set back so much by the jealousy and the envy. And you already just answered that a little bit, which is figuring out what you are bringing to the cafeteria. I love how you said that, like kind of realizing your, your stuff.

What else did you learn from your experience if you could go back with Emily and Marni even, and think about that friendship from the Gecko. What would do differently?

Christie: The excavation of , what I brought to the cafeteria is just, what’s the payoff? , how did I magically always become the person that doesn’t quite fit in. I was manufacturing my own apartness because that’s, that got stamped on me.

I was a sensitive kid and this, the way my household was run, I just felt like I didn’t quite fit in. And the truth is I didn’t exactly fit in. I was full of feeling. I wanted to talk about my feelings and write poems about my feelings, and everybody else wanted to go. I didn’t exactly fit in whatever.

That’s not tragic by any means, but by the time I got to having my own relationships, Some of it was just familiarity, so simple. But it’s familiar and the power of the familiar for me to go into social situ. With my very comfy blanket of, I don’t quite fit in. I’m either married and no one else is married, or y’all are all married and I’m still on J date. I always had a reason why I wasn’t as snugly swaddled in the group as anyone else and looking at what’s the payoff of that.

And really it was so simple. it’s super familiar. So to drop that narrative and extend myself and. Super uncomfortable

Nina: And then what about with competition? I think that’s

sort of a harder one, and we almost talk about that. Even less it’s probably more comfortable to talk about being envious of what other people have.

Jealous of people’s closeness. Like in the triangle situation, competition’s a little different but it’s related to envy

Christie: yes.

I think where competition has been most problematic starts back at the fact that I haven’t felt entitled to my desires, my hungers and my ambitions. Cuz competition for me stems from, I want. , I’m hungry for, I wanna go for this thing. And because that’s sort of unspeakable, I think I have the idea that that’s not very feminine, that it’s not attractive to be so hungry and ambitious.

That’s some socialization that I’m working to shed, but put me in a social situation and there’s things I want and other people. I’m quietly wanting them. It becomes not a shared experience. It becomes I alone, even though, you know, when I’m friends with writers, when I was early in my writing career, other people were getting things.

I mean, they’re still getting things I’m not getting, but early on, before I had any of these skills or had really worked on that, . , I’d have to go to bed for the day if somebody got something that I had wanted or I even tried for it and I got a flush letter and they got a residency or whatever, I think that it was because I hadn’t been able to own my desire.

It goes all the way back to the most gendered thing ever. I wasn’t allowed to want. So it was a secret and then it was like a secret loss when I didn’t get it. And as I’ve been a little bit shouter, I want things. I want other people to want things too. But it became okay to truly, truly root for someone else when I was able to own what I wanted and let them root for me.

But if it’s not a shared experience, I’m in so much trouble.

Nina: , You are so comfortable, understanding yourself. That comes through in both books and I think a lot of people can learn from that. I wanna tell you something totally different topic from Triangles or envy, jealousy.

I appreciated the point of view from somebody who has done the ghosting, cuz I was ghosted by a very, very close friend and on behalf of my own listeners or readers who, I get so many letters from people who have been ghosted or from people who suspect they’re about to be ghosted. And it’s very rare to get your point of view.

You acknowledged in there that you also missed the friendships. I’m thinking especially of your friend Leah, your

old, old friend and we won’t say in the book what happens there, you know, let people read it. But , I appreciated you acknowledging as you were the person who left that friendship or just gonna let it go.

It wasn’t a big dramatic thing, but just kind of let it end and, but that you missed it and you worried that you’d miss so much and you worried that you would never. Be able to reach back out

Christie: so I have so many feelings about ghosting. , it’s a topic I really like to talk about and I’ve had a ton of conversations. I have never talked to another ghoster, not in a friendship. Plenty of people have ghosted men or, or straight women ghosting men or love interest going whatever way.

, I can’t be the only friend who has ghosted? , I hope to God I would not do it today. I don’t believe that’s my mo. , I did not have the skills for anything except vaporization. I did not have the skills, and I don’t like that. I have that in my history at all.

And where are the other ghosts? Email me, guys. Tell me your ghosting stories.

Nina: I should tell my old friend who we don’t

really talk, i, I thought of her a lot when I read your book and it was actually really helpful because. Like you just said, even and you, say it differently in the book, sometimes it was the other person, but not always.

It was like you didn’t know what else to do in that moment, and it actually gave me compassion for my old friend. It did. Instead of anger, it gave me compassion for her to say, you know what, maybe that was all she could do at the time. , for other reasons in her life. She couldn’t handle our friendship and, and I’m sure I had something to do with it too, cuz that is part of it, but it wasn’t just me,

Christie: right, right, Exactly. And I too, even. The relationships, the ones that I write about, with my high school friends, I drifted away out of shame. , I didn’t have the word shame yet. I hadn’t been to therapy. I didn’t know. I was just like mortified by who I was and I was so lost and I just couldn’t bear , what I perceived as their shininess and the face of my just like utter lossness.

It was easier to drift. but with a close friend, you know, when I was a new mom and I was just like, I didn’t have the bandwidth. , I just didn’t.

And when I think back to the most recent one, With a friend. We’ve since reconnected. , I too have compassion for me and for her, and I remember thinking there’s no way out. We have trapped each other and somebody has to throw open the window and jump. And that’s how I thought of it as kind of an act of mercy, even though from her vantage point, it looks like it’s just pure chicken shit.

But to me it really was like a mercy killing

Nina: Yeah, , I get it. okay. To close us up. Cause otherwise I will talk to you forever . . I wanted to end with the image of the circle.

Since we’ve been talking a lot about triangles , and triangles do come up a lot in the book and they come up a lot in our lives. But why don’t you explain, , it’s not a spoiler thing because we know Meredith dies, which is the whole premise of, of this.

Christie: I really felt the full impact of our work and the, Stunning gifts of my friendship with Meredith when she’d passed away. And she had a lot of friends, , we had mutual friends. , but we, never hung out really in a group. what I realized, instead of imagining like I had my whole life a hierarchy, there’s Meredith at the top, then who’s next?

Is it me or is it Anna? Ooh, where’s her husband? , what’s the pecking order, I’d spent my life trying to discern the pecking order and rise. Right. Or not fall down. And what I realized around s death and planning her memorial service and all of us coming together is like I was visualizing a circle where there is no hierarchy.

I was like, oh my God. The solution is a circle. It’s a circle that way there’s no jockeying. There’s just holding hands and moving around the circle , and the Mott has that quote that I think of all the time. We’re all just walking each other. , , the triangle had the edges, right?

Those sharp edges that I was always cutting myself on of the triangle had softened into a circle and it couldn’t hurt me anymore. And that was because the shape in my head had changed. And then guess what? The way that I operated in the world also changed. I don’t know which came first, but I’m so glad that I arrived at the circle and was able to let go of the hierarchy and the triangle that had dogged me.

All those.

Nina: perfect place for us to end our conversation, for me to release you back into the world. And one day when I’m in Chicago, we’ll have to get together not for interviews and not for writing or retreat, but just to hang. Although my mom lives in the suburbs, so

Christie: I’ll come out there. I’m gonna, I’m gonna visit you out there. I would love that

Nina: , a couple of my sweaters that people liked in Palm Springs are from a cute store in Glenco, so you’ll have to come up to the verbs.

Christie: A hundred percent. You’ve lured me with the shopping. We’re done.

Nina: Chrissy, thank you so much. I wish you so much success with the book. ,

Christie: thanks Nina. I love this podcast. I love your focus on friendship as a complex, dynamic, really important part of life. So thanks for taking it seriously, and thanks for giving me your time and attention.

Nina: Listeners, we’ll see you back in a couple of weeks. As I always say, when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around, and I really think that’s true, . I think Christie agrees.

Christie: Yeah.

Nina: All right, bye guys.