They must change …Ītwood: Well, of course they change. Senior: If it’s not too delicate, I was wondering whether the shape of your friendships also changed once your partner, Graeme Gibson, died. I think the line is, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”
And I suppose you could move to something like Owen’s poem about World War I, in which two dead people are encountering each other, one from either side. But she says, nonetheless, we remember these battles because we shared them. If you read Phyllis Chesler’s book about early-’70s feminism, you’ll realize that people were fighting all the time. They migrate from being a person you possibly wouldn’t speak to to someone with whom you might share rueful anecdotes.
Margaret Atwood: I don’t think they migrate from being your enemy to being your dearest friend. At the risk of being too personal, is there somebody in your life who migrated from one category to the other? Jennifer Senior: Let’s start with: You wrote to me that when you’re much older, some of your enemies become friends. Read: It's your friends who break your heart Here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of our discussion. Mythology is everything that happened before you were born, she wrote in our February 9 exchange. I drank in the book this past weekend, in two warm slugs.) Also, she speaks in perfect aphorisms, just as she so often does on Twitter. (Her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, publishes on March 1. Margaret Atwood in real time is very much who you would expect the author of her 17 novels, 18 books of poetry, and 11 works of nonfiction to be: game, associative, energetic. I wrote her an email: Would she chat with me for a bit about this? About envy in friendship, about friendship in old age? I know no writers who’ve had some success who have not encountered it. She added that she liked the part of my story about envy. Her reply: Your old enemies may become pals because there’s only the two of youse left who can remember the Dark Agesīefore there were computers. Weirdly, no one else had made this observation. This is what Margaret Atwood wrote to me on February 9, about 14 hours after I’d tweeted an essay I’d just completed about the heartache and complexity of friendships in midlife. So this is something you don’t experience every day as a writer: You post a thread about your new story on Twitter, a medium with which you have a love-hate relationship at best (essential to publicity, but also a forum for cruelty, an open pasture for a firing squad), and suddenly, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale appears in your timeline. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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