Fictional Friendships – by Kay Langdale

What’s your favourite fictional friendship? Whilst you might be quicker to think of your favourite fictional love affair (Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler anyone?), a quick trawl through some examples shows how writing about friendship is rich emotional territory.

Children’s literature is a good place to start. In The Secret Garden, sour-faced Mary works with invalid Colin in the walled, abandoned garden, and through fresh air and working together, they heal themselves physically and emotionally.  In Heidi, Clara comes to stay with Heidi and her grandfather, and the wholesomeness of their friendship (plus Peter pushing the wheelchair down the mountain) becomes the means by which Clara gains the strength and will to walk. In Goodnight Mister Tom, the friendship is cross generational, where gruff Tom intuitively understands evacuee William’s anxiety, and quietly changes his soaked bed sheets each morning without comment.

Female friendships in fiction are complex and multi-faceted, and frequently draw blood. Edna O’ Brien’s Cait and Baba are capable of great cruelty to each other in a relationship rooted in both closeness and competitiveness. Elizabeth Bennett and Charlotte Lucas have been friends since childhood, but when Charlotte settles for Mr Collins, their friendship becomes more about ‘what had been rather than what was’.  Jane Eyre’s friendship with Helen Burns is brief, but from her she learns the quiet bravery which informs her character long after Helen is dead. In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Cordelia is the arch tormentor, and it is only with hindsight that Elaine can see how tormented Cordelia herself was. In The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Harold walks the length of the country not for his wife, but for his work colleague and friend Queenie.

And so friendship in fiction is most often a bringer of change rather than a passionate end in itself.  It involves mutual shoring-up, and does not draw on the grand gestures of love or betrayal. Friendship, in life as in fiction, speaks in quieter tongues, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

In writing The Comfort of Others, I placed friendship at the heart of the novel; in this case, a cross-generational friendship between an elderly woman, Minnie, and an eleven year old boy, Max. With a child’s unerring instinct for truth, Max understands that their age, and their different situations are not important. Both of them need to face the truth about their lives, and in the course of the novel they help each other to do so.

The Comfort of Others is about what Max and Minnie share rather than how they differ, and about how friendship can be a balm for secrets long-buried. The gift Max and Minnie give each other is to be comfortable in their own skin.

Kay Langdale’s latest novel The Comfort of Others is out in paperback and ebook now.