I have a very dear friend who is ill. We’ve been friends for what will be 19 years this September. About eight years ago, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
How the brain tumor was found is straight out of a book. She worked for the local transit company doing bus maintenance. One night, a faulty door holder gave way, and the engine door fell and hit her on the head. When the ensuing headache did not go away after several months, an MRI was done and the tumor was located. Had the bus door not fallen on her head, the tumor would have killed her within a year, two at the most.
What does this have to do with books, you might ask?
A biopsy revealed that the tumor was pre-malignant and inoperable. A drastic course of radiation followed, but in the course of the biopsy, nerve damage had been done. My friend was left with a headache that would last for the next nine years. As those who deal with chronic pain know, it’s easy to become sad and desparate and angry and reach out for anything that makes the pain go away. My friend was prescribed oxycontin to deal with the pain. After a time, her doctors decided in their infinite wisdom that she should stop taking them. By then, she was addicted. When her supply ran out, she looked for other avenues to relieve the pain. That led her to heroin, and another addiction. In the midst of this struggle, a new MRI showed that the tumor was growing again, this according to her oncologist. (It turned out that it wasn’t.) He put her on chemotherapy, and the combination of the self-medication with heroin and the chemo medication gave her seizures.
She’s been clean and sober for a few months now. AA helped her tremendously. But the seizures remained. She’s currently on three different anti-seizure medications, the side-effects of which include severe headache. So we’re back to square two. And over here on square one, a radiologist told her there was no change between her post-radiation MRI and the one that preceded her chemotherapy, so the chemo was totally unneccessary. Big pharma, anyone? I wonder how many times the oncologist had to prescribe that particular drug before he got a trip to the carribean or a new set of golf clubs?
My friend is slowly weaning herself off the anti-seizure meds, and the seizures are becoming less frequent and less severe. The headache has reduced quite a bit too without the aggravation of the anti-seizure medications. She’s getting Reiki treatments weekly and plans to get acupuncture. She’s still unable to drive herself anywhere. She needs to be six months seizure-free to get her license back. She’s on permanent disability and is unable to work. The good news is she gets disability pension from her employer which includes health insurance, and she’s now getting social security disability. But the experience has ruined her life, has changed her from a beautiful, vital woman into a sick, frightened, desperate woman. What keeps her going? Her incredible sense of humor. Even when her seizures are at their worst, making her laugh stops them in their tracks. So she laughs as much as she can, and she can laugh a lot. Best medicine, and all that.
Which brings me to the point. (Yes, there’s a point after all!) Friends in literature. My friend’s story is still being written, and who knows, I may write it, or at least write it with her. One of the main things that made us friends was love of books and reading, and we still have many of each other’s books that were loaned ten years ago.
Have you got book friends?
What books were written by friends, about friends?
Are there books written about friendships that have stuck with you?
And as always, what have you read lately?
Still working on new yorkers… re-read “the wee free men” to backfill on “hat full of sky”. Finally got a copy of “cryptonomicon”… damn, that’s a big-assed book! Really good so far, though.
Hope everyone has a great fourth.
by Wallace Stegner has always been the “friendship” book for me, and running neck-and-neck is Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
Regarding friends who write books. As it happens, my best friend is a commercial novelist in the lawyer-mystery genre. She is recovering from breast cancer of a particularly vicious variety that, while it set her back, did not defeat her, and she has continued writing throughout her ordeal. Well again, she’s at work on her next book that will not be part of her “Suspicion” series.
She’s my hero, a woman of bravery, cheerfulness, generosity, and great spirit.
We’re also travel buddies. This time last year we traveled to Gijon, Spain so she could attend a mystery writers noir convention.
Your post reminds me of the friendships of writers — Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, for example. Yes, theirs was a challenging relationship to classify since it went through so many phases and levels of intimacy. It is a friendship of novel material, you could say. Fascinating, both of them.
There are so many literary friendships, most of them rocky, but all so interesting to the onlooker, don’t you think? Truman Capote and Harper Lee, the “beat” writers, and of course that greatest of all friends, both personal and professional, to American literary talent of the last century, Maxwell Perkins, who introduced F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Thomas Wolfe to the rest of us.
Best to you and your friend, jlong. Friends are gosh darn special.
I met a new friend 3 years ago, you know one of those people you know instantly and you know you have known forever even though you just met. I happened to drop the infamous even if not true Gertrude Stien quote, supposely in her last moments of life. . .when Alice B Tokles asked, Gertrude, what is the answer? and Stien’s response was. . .what is the question? And that was the end of the two of us for days as she could not believe someone else had read stein or even knew who she was (my new friend is 15 years younger than I, so it could be a generational thing). We spent hours and days and many hours since comparing notes on the books we have read. Often both of us amazed that we have read so many of the same books that none of our other friends and family have ever heard of.
Book friends are very special and it is always a delight to chat about books or recommend books to each other knowing that we have so many books in common already, the suggestion will be well founded to our tastes and interests.
Right now I am reading too much me, so it must be I need a break and a peak into someone else’s writing for a bit.
Thanks for your book diaries, and for all the great comments from everyone. I’m taking notes, you can be assured.
My mom-in-law and I have been great friends since the day we met 35 years ago. Some of it was that she had always wanted a daughter (though she didn’t quite get what she wanted since she wanted to someone to shop for clothes with and I hate to shop and am pretty indifferent to what I wear). But a good portion of that instant love was that we realized were addicted to book reading.
Then, she and my mom also fell in love with each other after finding out that they both had loved and read all the Little Colonel books.
I’m very lucky that the two of them are still going strong (they are both in their early eighties) and that we call each other all the time to talk about what we’re reading.
I also have a friend who is a genre writer-he writes science fiction and military/historical books under his own name and two pseudonyms. I envy him a great deal, doing something he loves for a living.
are all packed… Making another move. First time I’ll be living in a Red county. Yikes!
But, thinking back and without being able to scan my bookshelves, I love the friendship in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T. The entire novel is an attempt of a friend to remember, recall, to keep present and alive the life of her dearest friend since childhood. Wonderful shifts in narrative time. Wonderful vignettes about life in East Germany after the war. Beautiful, slow, and nostalgiac cadence to the language. The book has a haunting beauty, that makes it my favorite novel of post-WWII German lit.
I also seem to recall that several of Hermann Hesse’s novels had some great, strong friendships. Demian definitely did. Narziss and Goldmund too. Siddharta as well? Anyways, nice, nostalgia-inducing boyhood friendships in his novels.
Always love reading your book diaries JLongs! Nice to see you posting them over here.
and good luck on the move.
Just talk to people. Get your verbal crowbars out and pry their minds open. I look forward to seeing diaries on your experience living in a red area!
My favorite book about friends is also the first book I bought with my own money, “The Wind in the Willows.” It’s the edition with the Arthur Rackham illustrations. I bought it in 1959 and I still have it.
I just finished Stephanie Coontz’s “Marriage: A History” which very successfully managed the always tricky balancing act of being a serious, indepth study and an involving read.
is a fabulous book. I may have to re-read that someday soon.
Last night I couldn’t think of a single book that was about a friendship. Of course this morning I have thought of many, mostly “the amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon. And it occurred to me that most of Salman Rushdie’s books deal with deep friendships on some level, especially “the ground beneath her feet” and “the satanic verses”. He’s one of my top 2 or 3 authors.
bought with your own money. Interesting. I can’t even remember what the first book I bought was.
But that brings up an interesting possible future Book Diary topic: books that one’s parents, relatives, or friends have given one that took on a special importance because those relationships.
I wish your friend the best…..
I have been a student of literature about friendship for quite some time, starting with my initial reading of Emerson’s essay “Friendship” about thirty years ago. It has some great quotes that are probably familiar:
“A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
and
“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
and
“I will receive from them not what they have but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.”
This started the trail backwards to Cicero’s De Amicitia and Aristotle’s Ethics, both of which describe and analyze “friendship”. Then, going forward, I have recently purchased a copy of The Norton Book of Friendship and I’m looking forward to reading the letters, stories and essays that Eudora Welty (a writer from my hometown here) and her friend Ron Sharp chose to include in this book.
Also, I am going to get a copy of The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy who were Mississippi writers also, and had a friendship that lasted for over fifty years.
I’ve just finished The Plot, by Will Eisner — a graphic novel about the origins and history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Very interesting stuff. I’m also reading Adeline Mowbray, by Amelia Opie, an 1805 novel about a young woman of radical politics who chooses for reasons of principle to live with her lover rather than marry him. I discovered it on a “What to read when you’ve read all of Jane Austen” list at Amazon, and it is indeed fascinating to look at the era — the nature of marriage, the status of women, the deference due (or not) to convention — from a decidedly different perspective.
The Opie book sounds fascinating. And I can even get a used copy at Powell’s.
You hadn’t mentioned before that you are a Jane Austen fan. A couple of authors that I think of as her descendants who you might like to try, if you haven’t already, are the late, great, and much missed Laurie Colwin and Elinor Lipman.
I love, love, love Jane Austen. I first read Pride and Prejudice in the ninth grade and couldn’t stand it — I was rather irony-impaired at fourteen, and took much of Austen’s satire far too literally. Years later a friend wanted me to go with him to see the film version of Sense and Sensibility, and I wanted to read the book first. To my great surprise I fell completely in love with it, and went on to read all of Austen that summer — and have reread all of them every couple of summers since. The experience encouraged me to reinvestigate certain other books and writers I disliked as an adolescent, with mixed results: I still don’t care much for Henry James, but at least I know I’ve given him an honest effort.
I’ve heard of both Colwin and Lipman, but haven’t read them — I’m putting them on my list now.
Have you seen the movie Bride and Prejudice? If not, I think you would enjoy it. It’s a lovingly done Bollywood-style version of, naturally, Pride and Prejudice.
I’ve not seen it, but Netflix will have it as of Tuesday, so… on the list it goes. (And it’ll be my first Bollywood film!)
Wow – your friends story really makes me continue to wonder why pain and struggles are so unevenly divided amongst us. I know its a useless question, but its there nonetheless. I’m so glad she has a friend like you!
In terms of friends and books, I have been part of a book group of women for over 5 years. Up until a few months ago, we met once a month and went on a weekend trip once a year. None of us have been really close outside the group. But I have sooo enjoyed it. A couple of months ago one of our members lost her sister to cancer, ended her marriage and found out she has lung cancer – all in one month’s time. As a group we have rallied around her in a way that has amazed me. She constantly says that all of the support we are giving her is definitely helping her heal from the cancer. All I can say to that is WOW!! Now thats a statement about the power of friendship.
One other note about the group. One of our members has been in a relationship with another woman for over 20 years. Prior to that time, they were both married with children and never felt attracted to another woman. When they met – it was practically love at first sight and they risked all to be together. In the last couple of years they have written a book about their experience. It hasn’t been published yet. But our group got to read one of the original drafts. It was a great book, but maybe I’m a bit prejudiced.
Support is a wonderful thing. I think one reason the reiki is working for her is because she feels safe, supported, and loved. (two very dear friends and I are her “treatment team”, I’ve been a level 2 practicioner for about 5 years and one of the two dear friends is a level 3 master.) It definitely helps in healing.
I hope your friend continues to improve-and I’m glad she has the support of good friends!
I’m reading “Bite Club” by Hal Bodner-a very funny gay/vampire/ mystery story. And now that you mentioned Terry Pratchet I have an urge to read his older books again-anything with the witches! I recently read “The Truth” and “Going Postal” and loved them both.
Books about friendship-“Charlotte’s Web” always comes to
my mind.
My copy of “going postal” is on its way even as I type. I re-read him periodically-my favorites are “small gods” and “soul music”… though “the truth” is pure genius in its own way.
and the truth shall make ye fret.
tee hee
My current favourite is ‘Charts of Philosophies and Philosophers’ by Milton D. Hunnex (Zondervan). It’s a crib book. It resides in the john, as you Yanks used to call it euphemistically. I prefer the Shakespearean ‘jakes’.
I was always unusually silent when a philosopher was brought into the conversation – I knew I was about to be found out as the lightweight intellectual I really am. I survived by quoting Mr Chance-like obscure organic aphorisms to lead the dialogue away from my shortcomings.
No longer. I now have the complete history of world philosophy in simple ‘geneological’ timelines, with one para summaries of what each philo contributed. It’s the Bluffer’s guide to the subject.
It is not a pleasure to read, but the librarial location is apt.
by Solomon Volkov
Emphasis on ‘cultural’ because that makes it so readable and interesting. The writer tells us the story of St. Petersburg with the lives of poets, visual artists, performing artists, and writers.
Right now, I’m reading about the arrests of the young Dostoyevsky and friends. About 30 of them met once a week to discuss books, poetry, philosophy and new ideas in general. A book critic informant send a copy of his bad book reviews to the secret police and an informant infiltrated the group of intellectuals. This led to their arrests, a mock execution and four years of forced labour. Dostoyevsky did not write for ten years after his arrest.
Can you imagine such a thing happening to your group here, arrested just for discussing books and ideas?
(It’s 550 pp, so I will not be doing a book report anytime soon. 🙂 )
Amazon says it’s from 1997, so pretty recent.
I loved Leningrad (it will always be Leningrad in my heart…), and I’ve had a renewed interest in Russia, and the topics covered in this book seem right up my alley. I’m putting it on my Christmas list.
Lucky you to have actually been there.
It will always be “St. Petersburg” to me after my love affair with Dostoyevsky’s writing.
Later I read the heart-breaking The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. (5 star review) I do not think I could read a book like that today but I highly recommend it. One detail from the book, that keeps coming back, the people at the art museum survived by eating the linseed oil in the museums art supply department.
You will enjoy the “St Petersburg: A Cultural History”, well-written and comes with two sections of pictures.