Friendship (29 page)
I think about you all the time, and I want to call you. There’s all this little stuff that happens that I think you would be the only person to appreciate, and I don’t know what to do with those thoughts, those jokes, those feelings. I should write them down, I guess. In case we ever become friends again, I can hand you a notebook with every stupid joke I thought of during the time when we were apart. But it’s hard to imagine us being together. I worry that even if you can forgive me for abandoning you when you most needed a best friend, I won’t be able to fit into your new life.
On the day that your baby was born, Sally called me and left a message asking if I wanted to be there for the birth. I was really grateful to her for doing that. But I didn’t know whether you’d want me there, even though she seemed to think that maybe you would. I didn’t want to risk making something that was already going to be hard for you even harder. Then she called me later to say that there were complications and that they were moving you to the hospital instead of letting you have the baby at home, and she sounded so scared. Until right then it had never occurred to me that anything bad could happen to you or the baby. This sounds deranged, but I’m just going to tell you: in that moment I thought that if you died, or if the baby died, it would be my fault. I know that makes no sense. I don’t mean my fault for not talking you out of the pregnancy, I mean my fault for not being there, not spending every second willing everything to be okay, as if, if I’d been in the same room as you, I could have protected you just via how much I cared.
The reason I didn’t get in touch sooner is that I was so ashamed of myself for not being there in that moment, and I was scared of how it would feel if you picked up the phone and sounded disappointed to hear my voice. Which in and of itself is selfish. I’m going to stop making excuses. I’m sorry.
She looked at what she’d written, hated it, and decided to hit “send” anyway. Then she went back into the bathroom and petted Waffles some more. She almost didn’t hear her phone when it made its tinny text sound.
It was Bev. “YT?” the text said. It meant, of course, “You there?” But they usually used it to see whether the other person was on Gchat. Amy’s heart leaped, then sank as she worried that Bev hadn’t intended the text—had sent it accidentally or to someone else. But she wrote back anyway: “Yes!!!!”
“Hi.”
The message was intended for her; somehow, she knew.
Amy wrote back: “Hi.:’(”
There was a pause. Those three horrible dots. But they disappeared, and then in their place there was a “
<
3.”
“
<
3” Amy replied.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Keith Gessen, whose all-encompassing support made the writing of this book possible, and to Ruth Curry for being not only my best friend but the best friend possible. Thanks to Writing Club (Bennett Madison, Anya Yurchyshyn, and Lukas Volger) for help, encouragement, and cheese. Thanks to Cookbook Club (Sadie Stein, Lukas Volger, and Ruth Curry) for emotional and physical nourishment. Thanks to Book Club (Nozlee Samadzadeh, Zan Romanoff, Logan Sachon, and Miranda Popkey) for befriending me, and for introducing me to Miranda. Thanks to Miranda also for her dogged, sensitive, and brilliant editing.
I worked on this book in a lot of different friends’ and relatives’ and even some strangers’ homes. Thanks to Rachel Cox and Greg McKenna, Sarah Cox, and Jennifer Kabat; also, apologies for stealing various aspects of your decor and putting them in this book. Thanks to Sari Botton for her extensive yenta-ing and her expertise in all things Rosendale. Thanks also to the Gessen family—Alexander, Tatiana, Philip, Daniel, and Pushkin—for many writing residencies.
Thanks to bosses and mentors past and present: Will Schwalbe, Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, Alison West, Deborah Wolk, David Jacobs, and Natalie Podrazik. Thanks to everyone at the Greenpoint Reformed Church Soup Kitchen and Food Pantry, especially Christine Zounek, whose spirit lives on. Huge thanks to our cherished Emily Books customers and subscribers. Your enthusiasm for offbeat books by women and other weirdos makes me feel hopeful about the future of reading, writing, and publishing.
Thanks to everyone at FSG, especially publicity guru Gregory Wazowicz and genius copy editor Maxine Bartow. Thank you, beautiful and brilliant Mel Flashman, and everyone at Trident Media Group, especially Sarah Bush, Sylvie Rosokoff, and Michael Ferrante. And thank you, Rowan Cope at Virago/Little, Brown UK.
I could not have written this or any book without the love and support of my parents, Rob and Kate Gould; my brother, Ben Gould; and the rest of the Deshler-Gould clan, especially my grandparents Walter and Ila Deshler and my grandmother Doris Gould. I love you all very much.
Shout-out to Raffles (RIP): You were a great cat.
ALSO BY EMILY GOULD
And the Heart Says Whatever
Hex Education
(with Zareen Jaffery)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Gould is the author of
And the Heart Says Whatever
(Free Press, 2010) and the co-owner, with Ruth Curry, of a feminist publishing start-up, Emily Books, that sells new and backlist titles via a subscription model. She has written extensively for publications including
The New York Times
,
The New York Times Magazine
,
MIT Technology Review
,
Poetry
magazine,
The London Review of Books
,
n
+
1
,
The Guardian
,
The Economist
,
Slate
, and
Jezebel
, and was an editor at Gawker in 2008. She is best known as a blogger, having maintained an online presence since 2005 at
emilymagazine.com
.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Emily Gould
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gould, Emily.
Friendship: a novel / Emily Gould. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-15861-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71089-7 (ebook)
1. Women—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Pregnancy—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O8845 F75 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013034422