Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina Conversations About Friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badzin. I’m a writer, a writing group leader at Modernwell in Minneapolis and a friendship enthusiast. Today we are talking about the potential magic of college friendships. I say potential because I know not everybody who goes to college has the same experience of forging important or lifelong friendships. But this episode isn’t necessarily about college friendships that last. After high school is a time to start anew with lessons you learned about yourself growing up. And since I have a senior in high school, i find myself nostalgic about this time in my own life when I was simultaneously nervous and excited to make new friends.

Nina: Here to have a conversation about this topic with me is Daisy Alpert-Florin, author of a recent favorite book of mine, my Last Innocent Year, which was also highly recommended by Curtis Sintenfeld, one of my favorite authors. My Last Innocent Year takes place on a fictional Northeast liberal arts college campus in the 90s And if you’re a Gen X woman who went to college before smartphones or social media, when we had to leave messages on dry erase boards to say where we might meet later that day and trust that you would be there. This setting and story will speak to you. I want all listeners with thoughts about college friends to relate to this episode, so we’re not going to spend too much time on the book itself. As listeners know, we’re here for the friendship stuff. But I will let Daisy soon tell us a little bit about the book, because it is so good and it’s an important context for the episode.

Nina: Quick note about Daisy. Daisy attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of several writing fellowships. A native New Yorker, daisy lives in Connecticut with her family. So we got East Coast to Midwest. Welcome Daisy.

Daisy: Oh, thanks, nina, So great to be here with you.

Nina: And you know what’s funny, Daisy? So you’re from the East Coast, you went to college in the East Coast. Your book takes place in the East Coast. I am from Chicago, went to college in St Louis, live in Minneapolis, So it’s like I truly am Midwest girl.

Daisy: I love this, but we’ll see how the book relates to you, despite our geographic diversity.

Nina: I found the campus atmosphere of your book so familiar and it’s like less about the place. Well, it is the place, but it’s the time. There’s something about the 90s And you hit this at just the right time, because it feels like everything’s 90s again. If you go into Target in the teen section, everybody’s looking into the 90s. Are people talking to you a lot about that?

Daisy: I went to college in the 90s, which is why I wrote a book about college in the 90s. I’d be hard pressed to write a book about college today. I’ll leave that to younger writers. But as I was writing, i started writing the book in 2015,. I took such a long time to write it that during that time we really were reexamining the 90s. You can’t really predict a trend. You can only write about what you’re interested in writing, about what obsesses you. But I was happy to hear that it sort of hit a cultural nerve.

Nina: It really, really did, and I could see why Curtis Sittenfeld liked it, because she wrote Prep, which took place at his boarding school, high school. But just there’s something about the campus novel. What are a few other ones that you really loved?

Daisy: The secret history is an obvious one to mention here, but that was when I read, when I still lived on a college campus. That came out, i think, in 1992, 94. But more recent ones. There was a book by Susan Choi called My Education, which I loved. I was reading it while I was thinking about this novel, and I love the two recent novels by Elif Bateman, the Idiot and Either or, which are campus novels very different from any of the other ones we’ve mentioned.

Nina: So let’s talk just a little bit more about the story of your novel, because there’s a story there, it’s not just a setting or a time. Then we will get on to those college relationships. Tell us what the book’s about.

Daisy: The book is set in 1998 on a fictional college campus called Wilder. The main character is Isabel Rosen, who is from New York City. She’s from the Lower East Side the pre-Hipster Lower East Side. Her father owns an appetizing store, which is a Jewish specialty food store. For those who are not familiar with that, It’s her final semester at Wilder. She’s finally found her spot there, when a couple of things happened to her. One is a non-consensual sexual encounter with a friend that opens the novel and kind of sets her off balance a little bit And she ends up falling into a love affair with her writing professor.

Daisy: So it’s a book that sort of examines the gray areas of consent, what it means to be a child on the verge of adulthood, what it means to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of our decision. And then I also was actually really interested in that final semester of college, specifically that moment when you’re technically an adult, you’re technically prepared to go out into the world and start building an adult life. But I just speaking personally, I did not feel ready for that transition. I don’t think it’s a transition that we talk enough about. I mean, you have someone going off to college now I have a child who’s in college and we talk a lot about that leaving the nest, going off to colleges like leaving the nest, but it’s really not. You’re really still in the nest, You’re still part of an institution that’s in Loco Prentice. But leaving college is really that, that step out into the world? So I wanted to look at that line of where you cross from child to adult and where it exists and if it exists, Okay.

Nina: So getting back to friendship, one thing I noted when you wrote for your Dartmouth alumni magazine about attending your 20 year reunion, which has already been a while now, because I think that was 2016, or maybe it was 2015. So you graduated a little before me. I graduated college in 99., Right Is? that how you do the math Right.

Daisy: Yeah, I was 95. Yeah.

Nina: Okay, very similar era. I kind of put every era in pre-smartphone, post-smartphone. If you are pre-smartphone., it really is very similar. But you said in there about attending that reunion, something I absolutely connected with. I also attended my 20 year reunion And I think you were almost answering your own question about, like, why do people go to reunions? What is special about it? What’s special even just about college? And you wrote because there’s something about seeing the people who knew you when you were young. That’s unlike anything else. Even if we didn’t really know each other or maybe didn’t like each other, we shared an unmistakable intimacy beneath the talk of careers and kids, and love ran a river of understanding. I remember you when you were young, when you were just starting to imagine what the world might look like with you in it And being around people who remembered that made me remember it too. I just love that. Isn’t that exactly what college friends do?

Daisy: Now that you’re just reading that I went to my 23 union in 2015. And that was just around the time I started writing the novel. So there was something in that experience. Also, a lot of writing I had been doing about my college years made me want to revisit that time. I’ve really felt that so strongly.

Daisy: At my reunion, i was sitting at the table with people I hadn’t seen in 20 years, but I remembered so much about them Maybe I had met their parents or their little sister when they came to visit. It was like I remembered. I almost felt like I knew more about them than I knew about the people I saw every day in my adult life. There was something about that time And there probably is something about our brain plasticity during those years which I’m not clever enough to talk about, but something about those impressions that we have when we’re young and certainly even younger, but just specifically those college years, they just really leave an impression on you. So I had a great time at my reunion And that was why I wrote that piece, because I was surprised at how much fun I had and how many people I connected with and wanted to talk to, and even, like I said, they’re, even if we hadn’t really been friends or we didn’t even really like each other.

Nina: You know, i think another piece of that special about that time is it’s not like you’re not in touch with your parents, especially now, parents and kids are in such close touch but they’re not right there immediately on campus And so you count on your friends in college in a way that is very different from how you count on your friends before and different from how you count on them after. this specific time. Those are the people who are immediately there. If you have to go to the hospital. for some reason you broke an ankle, you drank too much, whatever it is, that’s who’s going to accompany you.

Nina: There was one quote from the book. it’s about this small group of friends. There’s Kelsey and Deborah and Isabel. They’re worried about Deborah. Kelsey says to Isabel it’s not your responsibility to take care of Deborah. And Isabel says not in quotes but to the reader almost But who’s was it? I wondered who was there to catch us if not our friends? And that really is true in this time you’re not married. Even if you’re in a serious relationship of any kind, it still feels like it’s like the friend’s responsibility, those friends you made, sometimes freshman year maybe, just because you happened to live in the same dorm. There’s a lot to proximity and chance, and then, all of a sudden, you’re in charge of each other.

Daisy: Yeah, I think that’s actually I’ve never really thought about that. You’re right, The in-local parent is almost with your friends. Who’s going to take you if you need to go get your birth control pill renewed? I mean, and certainly in the 90s, yeah, we were in touch with our parents, but I don’t think I called them every day. I couldn’t call them any minute. I would have to go sit at the public pay phone with my calling card to call my mom at the office And you know what I mean. I wasn’t as in close touch with my parents. Maybe that was just me, But I think all of us were a little more detached from our parents than maybe our kids will be from us in this moment. So we really were relying on our friends when we were sick or depressed or had gone through a breakup or something happened with a class. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, And I wanted to show that the friendships in the novel there’s basically a little threesome.

Daisy: It’s Isabelle, the main character, and her friend Kelsey and her friend Deborah, And I made them all roommates this final year to really sort of like highlight how that friendship worked. And there’s something happening in the friendship this year where Isabelle is starting to realize that Kelsey and Deborah would maybe not be as close friends with each other if it wasn’t for her that she’s kind of the glue that’s holding this friendship together. It’s starting to strain. It’s starting to unravel a little bit in this final semester, which I think can happen. You know, as you start to leave a place, you might start to purposely pick fights with your friends just to make the leaving easier.

Nina: Oh, that definitely happened to me senior year. If any of my college friends are hearing this, they’re laughing and nodding.

Daisy: We have all kinds of problems Second semester, senior year, exactly like you’re saying They say when your teenager is being really difficult and you guys are not really getting along, sometimes it’s to make the coming apart easier. You know otherwise they would never leave and you would never let them leave. So it’s kind of can be like that too, Maybe that end of college.

Nina: It really is a scary time because you go from just having the time of your life to all of a sudden it feels like for a semester, senior year, especially like wait, the business major people are all interviewing for consulting jobs. When did that happen? Why are we all of a sudden doing that? Of course you have to do that. I mean people to make a living. People are taking the LSAT and the GMAT and it’s like things are getting serious quickly, It’s quick.

Daisy: Well, one of the things I wanted to think about also is how college is suspended time. It sort of feels longer than four years. when you’re in it, you know, it feels sort of like infinite. I for one never really thought about that I was going to ever leave. I mean one of the things I say about that second semester, senior year I had no idea that it was ending. If I had really known what was going to happen I would have spent the whole time crying, but I didn’t really know that it was ending. Everything just felt sort of infinite.

Daisy: You’re also, if you go to a campus school like I went to a campus school, wilder is a campus school you’re kind of in a suspended place. You’re sort of out of place and out of time. And also all the things you’re talking about getting jobs, taking the LSAT, all those kind of real world things sort of don’t apply. Everyone’s sort of eating at the dining hall. So you’re not maybe as aware of who has a lot of money and who doesn’t. I mean, maybe people are. I remember feeling like not really as aware of that when I was in college. It was only when we started to leave and this one could afford to. you know, take a year and travel in Italy, or this one’s parents could help her get an apartment, and all these things that I was suddenly aware. Oh, we actually aren’t the same. People have more and people have less.

Nina: In the book. Isabel does come from a background with a lot less income and her father is very, very concerned about what is she going to do after school. What is this English major going to do with herself? And that is a real part of the book, but it doesn’t seem to affect the friendship so much Like I see what you’re saying. There was another thing my last innocent year made me think about, and that is the things we talk about with our college friends and how that’s different than what we talk about with our adult friends. Before we were sort of comparing high school a little bit to college. I’m thinking now more about after, the kinds of talks I have with my friends now versus what I would have talked to my college friends about, and I know you had some thoughts about that too. What did you want to say about that?

Daisy: Yeah, I think when I was in college I remember in high school too you know you would talk about your boyfriends. I mean, this is going to get very heteronormative, but that’s just my experience You might talk about your sex life in a really explicit way. I remember doing that with friends. It would be like, okay, what happened last night? And you kind of get into real detail about that.

Daisy: Then something changes when you leave college and you have maybe more adult relationships, or maybe you’re with in a relationship with the person you’re ultimately going to marry, and then you do marry them, and then those conversations aren’t really appropriate anymore.

Daisy: At least that’s my experience. This person who you’ve chosen to partner up with becomes kind of the primary relationship of your life, even though friendships are super important. But it’s almost like on you to protect that primary relationship and to be really careful and ginger around it. I feel that way about my children also, at a certain point I don’t want to talk about what’s going on intimately with my children with other people, because I feel it’s not my information to share and I want to protect them to a certain extent. For me, i felt distanced in friendships when I can’t really talk about these things that are a big part of my life and might really be upsetting me or weighing on me, but I feel like I have to keep up a barrier, even with my very close friends, and not talk about the most difficult things that are happening in my life. But in college you talked about it all. Everything was on the table. You just went deep.

Nina: It really is different. I actually have done two episodes entirely about the issue of those barriers on kind of two ends of it. One was an answer to a letter. somebody wrote about feeling frustrated that friends were pushing her to really say more than she wanted to say about her kid. Yet she understood why they were asking their trying to be good friends. It was clear something was up, exactly like you’re saying, like it’s the kid’s business, especially as the kid gets older, even if the kid’s younger, maybe the parents being careful not to have that kid carry a certain label forever and ever.

Nina: Yet within privacy can be isolation. You’re right, that does not exist as much in college and that’s short amount of time, the amount of information people know I’m thinking about. When I went abroad, i spent nine months of my junior year in Santiago and I went to Wash U in St Louis and Wash U had the program in Santiago. Not that many kids went. Most kids who were Spanish majors went to Spain to the program. There I was very fascinated with Latin American literature and in Spanish. Reading it in Spanish, it was just amazing And so I chose that program.

Nina: I became very close with my friend Becky, different than the Becky. I had a Becky who goes by Rebecca now, who was on my podcast from college too. This one’s different Becky, who lives in LA now. When I think of the nights we stayed up, we each lived with a Chilean family, so it’s like we weren’t living together, but we would travel together when we had the opportunity. So we would stay in these hotels, youth hostels, whatever, and we would just talk and talk because we did not have smartphones. I really feel like that is the difference You can either read a book or you could talk. Those were your two at night entertainment options once you were back in your room. I know things about her and she knows things about me that I don’t think other college friends know. High school friends know adult friends. It’s like the time That’s what we have in college time.

Daisy: The time. You’re right. That is another thing. Time is this endless commodity, and I see it with my kids now, where I sort of joke. I’m like you don’t believe the space, time continuum exists. Time is less regimented, it’s more elastic, maybe just when you’re young, but certainly in college.

Nina: And in terms of keeping in touch as an adult, because that’s a piece of this. I call this the potential magic of college friendships. Becky’s a great example. We could talk once every five years and I would feel just as close because we get each other, we appreciate each other. We also got each other through. It’s not just college, but college abroad. I’m just so grateful for her. So many years later it’s over 20 years later Those memories are so vivid. It doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, whereas in adult friendships sometimes months could go by with someone in town and I’m like are we?

Daisy: still friends? You really question. That’s something in the book. Isabel and Deborah have this really formative friendship And the book does sort of flash forward in time. So you are aware of them as adults and they’re still friends And even though Deborah is a difficult person, their friendship is challenging. Isabel remarks that she knew they would always be friends, even if she didn’t always like her, even if she was difficult, that later she would drop people for less. But, deborah, they had just been friends during, you know, a difficult time, a challenging time in their lives. They knew things about each other, intimate things about each other, that you wouldn’t be as eager to share maybe 10 years later.

Daisy: right In those college years, you’re really figuring yourself out. So it’s almost like through the process of figuring yourself out you do through other people. You see how your stories land on another person. It’s almost like you’re trying out all these different personas to see which one sticks, which one lands. And you do that by bouncing up against these other people. And you know a college campus is a place where you’re just bumping up against people all the time. You’re living right on top of each other. Privacy is not really a thing. You’re sharing the bathroom. you know, when someone’s taking a shower, when someone’s taking a nap, when someone’s hungover, when someone’s up all night by themselves or with somebody else, you’re just like really jammed up against each other And that proximity, like you said, is a force of friendship making.

Nina: You know, the space that we give each other in college to try on these different things is a very special thing And it really isn’t replicated much after, unless you completely move towns and change careers and have totally new friends, which people do do. But I’m thinking about I had. This is really bringing back so many memories. Freshman year in college I was having somewhat of an argument on the phone with a high school friend. My best friend from college was from Maryland And we always argue over who has the accent.

Nina: I think she has an accent. She thinks I have an accent. I was talking to my Chicago friend on the phone and she stopped me and she said hold on for a second, why are you talking so differently? I think I was trying on this East Coast accent and she basically called me out rightfully. She was like Nina, you don’t even sound like yourself. And I don’t think she just meant the accent, i think she meant in general. I think I was being more aggressive than I ever had been And that’s not something I’m proud of. I doubt the back, i think, as time went on, but I was trying that out. I was trying on debate college Nina, you know intellectual Nina.

Daisy: I was. College is a place that you actively choose, and I’m kind of generalizing here. But for most people, i think, when you go to college it’s the first time you’re making an affirmative decision about the kind of community that you want to be in. High school is oftentimes a function of either where you grew up, you know you just go to the public school that’s in the town that you grew up in, which is something your parents have chosen for you, or you go to some other school that your parents have chosen for you. But going off to college, you’re really looking at what kind of environment do I want to be in, what kind of setting, and you know what kind of people do I want to be around. Maybe you went to a big public high school but now you want to go to a small liberal arts college, and then the friendships that you make there are a function of that choice of community.

Daisy: I grew up in New York City. I went to public school in New York City. I loved where I grew up, but when I looked at colleges, i looked at small colleges in small one traffic light towns. I don’t know why, really, but I wanted that experience. I wanted a college. That reminded me of my summer camp, because I loved camp And I wanted to go to college where I felt like everyone was just going to be there all the time. No one was going to be taking the subway downtown or you know, taking the train to Brooklyn and going to a club. I wanted to know that on a Saturday night I was going to be able to find everybody And I could. Everyone was just there all the time And even though we didn’t have cell phones and we had no way of finding each other, you kind of always knew where people would be and that you bump into them eventually And I loved that And the kinds of friends that I made in college I guess were a function of that decision.

Daisy: Those were the kinds of people who wanted to be there. They wanted the same experience that I did. So you know, looking back, as much as I loved where I grew up and I really did love my high school and I had great friends in high school I’m not really in touch with people from high school. My list of friends, of people that I talked to, the contacts in my phone don’t actually include any of my high school friends. It’s my college friends who are on that list. They’re the people who I reach out to the most, and that might be who knows why, but you know, maybe because of a function of the kind of people that I sought out during that time in my life.

Nina: One last piece of the college friendship aspect I want to talk about with you is and it’s so clear in the book is the way in college we make decisions almost in a consensus. I personally found it hard to get out of that meaning I liked it in college. It was very natural for me to kind of almost everything was like a group decision Where are we eating tonight? Yeah, something as basic as that, but also something bigger like am I breaking up with this boyfriend? Everything for me was by consensus And I think it took me and maybe this is an issue of my own maturity or lack of maturity at depending on the time. So in this case, lack of maturity it took me a while to stop doing that, not necessarily with just college friends, but like even as I was making frises as an adult. That obviously speaks to something in me that I always am working on is just making my own decisions, independent of what people will think I’m a pleaser. College breeds that, but then it’s hard to be done with it.

Daisy: It is a kind of scaffolding, right? It’s like you grow up in a family that you are asking for advice. How should I do this? We give our kids advice all the time, or try to help them make those decisions. You’re transferred to college, you leave the nest, you’re in an institution that is supporting you and you turn to your friends. I think I turn to my friends more than I maybe talk to my parents. I mean, i did have friends who I know called their mom every day and would sort of be like what class should I take? Or you know, i’m working on this paper. I never talked to my parents about that stuff. It’s not that they didn’t care, but they didn’t know the landscape. So you would ask your friends, and so that was a kind of scaffolding.

Daisy: And I actually really, really think that the book is a coming of age story. It’s a loss of innocence story, and all of that is sort of the journey to adulthood. And the journey to adulthood is trusting your own voice, finding your own inner wisdom and listening to it and tuning into it, and that can be the work of a lifetime, nina. So I’m sure you do it beautifully now, but I think what you’re describing is learning to trust yourself and just stand on your own two feet, which is the work of growing up, and it is hard. It is really, really hard.

Nina: I do think I’ve gotten a lot better at making my own choices, but what I have to stop myself from doing is going out of PR campaign about it.

Daisy: I think that part of publishing this book for me was trusting my own decisions and that it got me this far to trust my gut and trust my instincts, because there were decisions I had to make along the way. Sometimes I would ask other people’s advice, but I tried not to ask too many people because I felt like was I really listening to them or was I just wanting them to confirm what I already thought? So maybe I could just skip that part.

Nina: We do do that, don’t we? That’s just natural, human, just to hear ourselves work something out. Daisy, i’m going to have us say goodbye, but one thing I didn’t say in the intro is that we both used to write for Brain Child Magazine and we’ve never met before, we’ve never spoken before, but we’ve seen each other’s bylines over the years and this is going to sound patronizing, but I’m so proud of you. This book is so good, so well received. The reviews are amazing. I can’t wait for more people to read it. and just congratulations on your success.

Daisy: Nina, same to you. We’ve been watching each other online for almost a decade and it’s an honor to be on your podcast and see everything you’ve built, and it’s just great. So thank you for having me.

Nina: The book is my last innocent year, but where can they find you on social media?

Daisy: I’m pretty much on. Instagram is my main spot, so you can find me at daisy underscore florin, and I also have a website, daisyflorincom, where you can sign up for my sub stack.

Nina: Okay, everybody, go out and get Daisy’s book and come back here next week. as I always say, because I believe it very deeply, when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. And if you have been listening to the podcast and liking it, i would love if you would share an episode with a friend, if you would take the extra step to give it five stars really no less on Apple and leave a review. that is so, so helpful. See you next week.