She Matters (31 page)

Thank you

T
his book was written with crucial support from Nancy Washburn and Tim Washburn, Marta Pierpoint and Ross Tillman, and Karin Stallard; and from Theresa Rebeck and the Lark Theatre Company, One Writer's Place, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo. It is my privilege and great fortune to be guided by Nan Graham, my generous editor. I thank her for her faith and unflagging attentions. Thank you to Eric Simonoff, my agent, devoted ally and friend, whose words of encouragement always steady me. I am grateful beyond measure to Andrew Peterson for his tremendous love and generosity. And thank you, Ezekiel and Otis. My life with you is rich, sweet, and so happy.

A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE

SHE MATTERS

Susanna Sonnenberg

Introduction

She Matters
is an exquisitely observed memoir told through the lens of female friendships. Tracing her life from early childhood through the present day, Susanna Sonnenberg examines the girls and women who have perplexed, devastated, sustained, and shaped her. What emerges is a highly intimate study of the rich bonds and complications of friendship.

1. Sonnenberg covers more than forty years and writes about twenty friendships. Which of these women would you want to be friends with? Is Susanna aware of the ways in which she is a challenging friend?

2. In the chapter “Roommate” Sonnenberg writes,
“My mother had taught me that sex—sexual touch, innuendo, sexual acts, sexual interest—was the way to know another person truly, connection guaranteed”.
How does this influence Susanna's ability to forge friendships? In what other ways does Sonnenberg's mother shape her ability to develop and maintain close connections with women?

3. Sonnenberg writes about Annabelle's antique furniture in “Annabelle Upstairs”:
“I was clouded by envy I had to beat back, how she belonged to these objects and through them understood her own belonging”.
How does the notion of belonging shape Susanna?

4. Friendships often change when one friend has a baby. How is Susanna affected by her friends who are mothers? How does becoming a mother affect her relationships with other women?

5. Some of the friendships described in
She Matters
burn out, and the one with Claire in “Kindling” ends with an outright breakup. Is there a common reason why these friendships fall apart? Have you ever had a friendship end? Some of the friendships don't last, such as Nina's in “Within Reach” and Flora's in “Naked.” Why does the author choose to include them in the book? What power do they still have?

6. Sonnenberg's first book,
Her Last Death
, chronicles her experience of growing up with a difficult and destructive mother, a subject she revisits in the chapter “Women Are Like This,” where she describes her childhood “home of women.” In
She Matters
she writes,
“What I really needed to know, to rewrite, was my previous definition of the word
mother
”.
How does she go about this monumental task? Which friends help her redefine
mother
? Has she forged a mature “home of women”?

7. What role does marriage play in the friendships Sonnenberg describes? Once she marries, what role do her friends play in her own understanding of marriage?

8. Sonnenberg writes of her friendship with Nina in “Within Reach” that she is
“unsure of the mistakes and what I failed to fix”.
Do you harbor lingering doubts, regrets, or questions about certain relationships?

9. Adele in “Ritual,” Connie in “Real Estate,” and Marlene in “The Four Seasons” support Susanna through difficult transitions. How do friendships sustain you in times of crisis?

10. Some of Susanna's friendships burn as passionately and fervently as love affairs. What distinguishes a friendship from a romance? In what ways are the two alike?

11. In “The Root Cellar,” Sonnenberg describes a dangerous situation. How does Susanna consider her own circumstances compared with her friend's? How does Sonnenberg feel about this now?

12. Sonnenberg looks back over a lifetime. How do you reflect on your own friendships as you read
She Matters
? Do you remember people you'd forgotten? Do you remember the person you once were?

Why are female friendships so important in life?

Women are intense and honest and emotional. Men can be, too, of course, yet these are not the traits immediately prized in our friend-ships with them, not the traits encouraged in men by our culture. Women will go to the most difficult and dangerous places, I think. We are compelled to. Your women friends will soothe you, protect you, nurture you, disappoint you, challenge you. All relationships do this to one degree or another, but with women—who are
about
relationship—it's exponentially fraught, which makes it very rich to write about.

When you started thinking about friendship, was there a core story or particular friend you wanted to write about?

Claire was my best friend ten years ago, and she dumped me. We'd been terribly close, because we shared the first years of motherhood together, and our kids were best friends, too. Without warning, she broke up with me, and when she explained why—briefly—she described me as someone I couldn't even begin to recognize. How had I been so sure of us? I wondered. How could I believe myself as one thing and she see someone so utterly different? Had we even been having the same friendship, for the same reasons? These questions got me started, and writing that story was a way to come to terms with the hurt and confusion. Our breakup also broke up our children.

Please tell us about some of the friendships you describe in the book.

The book begins with Patricia, a woman I'm close with almost twenty years into our friendship. When we met, we encouraged each other as writers, and that was important. Later we had babies at the same time, and Patricia, who came from a stable family whereas I did not, really guided me in those first crucial years, taught me a lot about being a mother. Now that our kids are teen-agers we've discovered a whole new relationship, something layered and mature, something complicated by all we know of each other. And we know everything! I love how there can be many identities to a single friendship.

I write about girlhood friendships, when you're just starting to feel your way beyond the world of your parents. A very important high school friendship—when girls cling to each other—I betrayed, even though I loved Claudia; I tried to pretend that my betrayal didn't matter. Of course it mattered. I was eleven when I knew Jessica, a camp friend who'd been hugely important to me one summer. I'd never forgotten her, and we found each other again on Facebook. I was so excited. We both were. But, then, under Facebook's insistence, we tried to reconnect and found we'd outgrown the selves who had needed the friendship. I write about Jessica because I'm interested in the ways a friendship itself retains power even when the friend has faded away.

I write about a fellow artist, Mary, who inspired me to render pain as art; an acquaintance, Connie, who inadvertently became crucial when she saw me through the death of my father; April, a wonderful, expressive, tender friend whom I disapproved of—some choices she made—and stopped talking to, only to reunite eight years later with much greater understanding and compassion, for her and for myself. We've been friends for twenty-five years.

Even in the closest and most passionate friendships you describe, there remains an undercurrent of ambivalence—an ambivalence you acknowledge in the book.

In my work I try to inhabit the place of ambivalence, an in-between state. We are often pushed into proclamations and announcements, whether it's about sex or parenting or work, whatever it is, but really that doesn't feel true to our natures. We end up betraying ourselves when we pretend we're not ambivalent.

You say of one friend, “[She] assured me of a way to be the right woman and right friend. She didn't demand more or prepare for less. She gave me a closeness I hadn't known how to have without its being awful” (page 17). Please tell us why this kind of un-awful closeness was previously impossible for you.

We look to our mothers to teach us how to be women, but in some cases—in mine—we don't have a good model. My mother—whom I wrote about in
Her Last Death
, so it's difficult to put this in one sentence—was a pathological liar, a heavy drug user, a seductress of men to the exclusion of almost all else. She was very competitive with me, which isn't an uncommon aspect of the mother-daughter relationship, especially as the girl enters adolescence, but my mother in the course of this competition was destructive and vicious and scary. I didn't learn healthy closeness. My early lessons of womanhood were: lie, seduce, compete, betray.

What was the greatest challenge as you wrote about your friends?

Confidences and confidentiality are the bedrocks of friendship, and I could not figure out at first how to tell the story of what mattered between me and these friends without giving away confidences. Finally, I just had to tell the reader that some things stay private.

You explore so many themes of women's intimacy with one another. Do you feel there's anything you left out?

Weight. I made a decision to leave weight out of the book. It's undeniably a ready topic among women, but I've never been comfortable with the way our attention is forced there. Endlessly. My mother told me I was a fat kid, and she sent me to Weight Watchers, and later I
struggled
to shift my thinking so that I could simply enjoy my body, be at home and alive in it. I feel sad when that's what women—marvelous, complicated, powerful, talented, loving women!—feel they have to comment on in each other and themselves.

Are you in touch with every woman in the book?

I am not. Some of these are ancient friendships, some outgrown, some ruined. Yet each woman here has taught me something essential, shown me some way through, helped me feel a family when my sense of family was shaky. When I started writing
She Matters
I was startled to see how many people had mattered this deeply, how crucial they were to who I am. I was startled, too, to realize that sometimes a woman had had only a moment's appearance, yet her influence had endured. I'd often wondered why I didn't have friendships with women that conformed to a certain notion of women's friendships—you and your four best friends from college rent a lake cabin every Labor Day weekend for decades, that kind of thing. I thought, Oh, I don't have continuity like that in my life, and I was envious and sad. But writing
She Matters
I saw another kind of continuity I had not defined before, strands of relationships running through my whole life, ways I had carried every friendship with me. Even though I'm interested in what's tricky and difficult in all of these friendships, even though I no longer know some of these people, this book is a declaration of gratitude.

Click through to read the excerpt “Famous Names” from Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir

Her Last Death

Available from Scribner

W
hen my mother was born, her father was famous. They lived in Santa Monica, where he composed Hollywood film scores, had novelty cameos alongside George Burns, Vivien Leigh. He played the harmonica brilliantly. My grandmother Patsy gave soirees and sent her three children to the birthday parties of movie stars' children. She was a noted beauty, first as a model (of hats), then as a ringer for Carole Lombard. “After the plane crash Clark Gable stopped at her table at the Stork Club, mute with grief,” my mother said. “Daddy had an affair with Ingrid Bergman!” she told us about him. “Imagine if
she'd
been your grandmother!”

Blacklisted, my grandfather moved the family to England, and his name was expunged from his Oscar-nominated credit. He achieved fresh fame, and my mother counted on the reaction when she mentioned him. She taught me to pick the people who would be impressed. “If they're American, they have to be over forty,” she said. “Of course, in England, everyone has heard of him.” I told some of my friends' parents, and she was right.

She grew up in London in the sixties, and her absolute best friend dated Paul McCartney. In restaurants, girls climbed crying and screaming through the windows to get to Paul and John, who always had to leave out the back way. I felt like she was there, it seemed like she was. At school I repeated for Marcy and Elise her story of warning John that “Strawberry Fields” would never be a hit. In high school, I told it less frequently because I began to recognize its unlikely quality. Not impossible, but unlikely.