Ocean Vuong, Jen Pastiloff, Marlee Grace, Fariha Roisin, Mira Jacob, Kimberly Drew, Jenna Wortham, me, and Safiya Noble at the 2019 Decatur Book Festival. Photo by Albrica Tierra
I have to confess that to this day, I haven’t fully figured out how to make and keep friends. It’s been even harder for me to make close friends with other writers, in large part because the way I’ve coped throughout my life with being so different is to try to position myself as better than everyone, which makes me a lousy friend among other people in my field (also in general but let’s not go there!).
Yet without close writer friends, I couldn’t be open to other creative and smart people’s ways of thinking and being, which left me unable to learn from others and limited my writing for a long time. So it’s taken a while and I’m still not quite there, but I have over the last few years worked very hard to think of the brilliant people around me not as competitors but as part of my amazing gang, my chosen family, my murder of crows. One of my most important roles as a friend to other writers is to set aside my jealousy and competitiveness so that I can support them as best I can.
I’m thinking about writer friends a lot a week before my book launch for Fairest, the ones who have been so kind as to agree to do events with me, the ones who agreed to blurb my book, the ones who’ve given me amazing feedback on my work, the ones who talk me down my cliffs of writerly despair and talk me up my ravines of authorial depression.
There are the friends whose work ethic continually motivates me, and the friends who leave me texts and voice memos to make sure I’m on track. There are the friends who makes me feel like I’m a worthy person regardless of what I accomplish or don’t accomplish in the world, and the friends who I know will always be there no matter what.
I feel so immensely fortunate that as imperfect a person as I am, so many wonderful people have been so kind as to consider me their friend. And without them, I wouldn’t have been able to have the motivation and the courage to write my book.
If you want to sustain yourself as a writer in a world that makes it so hard to be one, find a way to make and keep other writer friends. It’s as simple and as challenging as that.