Dolly Alderton

Kate Bowler: I’ve always said that I don’t have hobbies, I have friends. My name is Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So, look, I’m not someone with, I think, what they call self-esteem. I’m someone who is externally constituted. I’m an outside-in kind of person slash project. I am almost entirely held up by the people who love me, who remind me who I am, who carry my stories with them. Even, especially, the most embarrassing ones that they will remind me of again and again and again. Today’s conversation is dedicated to the many loves that make up our lives, especially that of our friends. And frankly, I don’t think friendships get enough hype. What a rare and precious gift to have friends. Friends that troll you. Friends that love you. Friends that want to hear your boring story. Isn’t it just a miracle that we get to have people who bear witness to our lives and we get to do that for other people? My guest today is someone who recognizes the great gift of the friends who’ve walked with her through many seasons of life. All the highs and lows and in-betweens. Dolly Alderton is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is the author of Sunday Times’ best-selling memoir, Everything I Know About Love. Also like when I see people reading it, I genuinely stop them and explain to them that the book is good from beginning to end. It also became an unbelievably brilliant television show, and her latest runaway best-selling novel, Good Material, is as good and so funny. And I feel so lucky to be talking with her today about the great loves that make up a life for partners and friends and ourselves. Holy crap, Dolly. I’ve been so excited about this. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

Dolly Alderton: Thank you so much for having me. We’ve met ten minutes ago, and I can already tell you’re an utterly delightful energy. So thank you so much for having me.

Kate: You, in one of your books, featured other great Canadian, Margaret Atwood, in describing the feeling of trying to live a story. And she has that gorgeous quote, ‘when you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion. A dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood like a house in a whirlwind. Or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story.’ And when you think about your lives as full of so many loves, I thought maybe that’s how we could frame a little bit of our conversation today about great loves that have made up your life.

Dolly: Yeah, I’d love that. I love that you picked out that quote because that was something they don’t tell you about when you publish a book is that if you quote anyone, the author pays for it still. So I was a 28-year-old with like no money living in a houseshare. And I quoted Auden, Margaret Atwood, Morrissey. And I tell you, I think Auden was £150 to quote an Auden poem. I was like, fine, that’s great. Take it out of my check. And then Morrissey, I think, was four and a half grand. And because I quoted the Smiths lyric, him and Johnny Marr had to read the book, start to approve, and they were like, look, we’re just going to warn you, we don’t think this is going to be top of Morrissey’s pile to read. So I think you’re going to lose the quote. But Margaret Atwood must have been bargain basement prices.

Kate: There’s there’s a thing I relate to so much in the way that you talk about your life, because almost all of our cultural storytelling is about romantic love. But like, one of the most beautiful things about my life has been the way it has been structured by the love of friends and you, you are deeply in love with your friends.

Dolly: Totally. I write an advice column and I wrote one, an answer today. And the question was from a girl who’s 21, and she said she’s been best friends with the same person since childhood. They were inseparable. She said, She’s my person. That’s how I describe her. And she’s fallen in love and the friend’s just gone. And I just felt the pain so acutely when I read this letter. I just remember that feeling so well. And I just like I so can forgive that we don’t realize how important these friendships are until you’re kind of into your mid-late 20s, you have to lose a romantic love, I think. Or you have to like dissolve into a relationship and totally sideline your friends and make that mistake to then come back and realize, God, I can’t ever do that again.

Kate: Because I remember the strange feeling of betrayal the first time a very good friend had a relationship.

Dolly: Betrayal and abandonment. And abandonment is like, this is what so much of what Good Material was about when I was kind of looking at the nature of heartbreak. Anything that feels at all like abandonment takes you back to a time even before memory I think. Something that set a cellular feeling of being a child or, I don’t know, of suddenly feeling I’m not safe. Someone’s gone. And every time that that’s merit again, whether it’s in rejection professionally or someone leaving you or a friend kind of replying to your texts because they’re with that boyfriend, it just takes you to an incredibly unreasonable, frightened place.

Kate: Totally. And you can feel how unreasonable and utterly reasonable it is. When you describe the framework of how you’re allowed to talk about problems, when you describe, I don’t know if I’m going to be good at summarizing this, but like when you have a problem and you really want to tell somebody, but it’s like you have chips, like you only have so many you’re allowed to put in. And I think when it comes to losing a friend, because we have so little cultural language for it, if you feel ghosted, slightly ignored, even just that’s like competitive with somebody else’s love. It’s really hard to know how many chips you’d have to put in to get the right response.

Dolly: Totally. I think there’s always that fear of intensity isn’t it. It’s like the easiest thing to weaponize against a woman. I often found when I was younger, whether it was like saying to a friend that I felt like we were drifting because she was spending too much time with her partner or whether it was, I don’t know, trying to get a boy to commit to me. He was totally noncommittal. It always loomed those words in my head. Just like you don’t want this experience to then be repackaged and told by them of like that tall, intense, like mad about gy girl that just was shouting at me about her feelings. You know, it’s like, that fear still looms so large for me all the time.

Kate: Everything you’re describing also, I’m not quite as tall, but I’m medium, pretty tall, that sounds so real to me. Yeah, because my first I think my first love love was my friend Chelsea. And you have a Farly. And reading about your Farly, it reminded me of my, I met Chelsea when I was ten, in, like, a judo camp. She just kept being there in all the weird stages. And then when I look back and I try to explain why there’s some version of well, when I moved away for the first time, she made me a scavenger hunt and I had to run around this park in the rain collecting letters. And then when I put them all together, they spelled conjunctivitis. I don’t know why.

Dolly: My God. Teenage girls are so weird. I love them so much.

Kate: It gets me.

Dolly: Yeah.

Kate: But you love me and you know me.

Dolly: It’s so strange that like, I’m actually writing about teenage girls at the moment. Me and my friend Caroline, we’re thinking about this project, which is about two teenage girls that are really intense with each other. And that feeling of, like, we have a language and a set of cultural references that unfortunately the rest of the world is too dumb to understand. Like it’s so potent that bond between two teenage girls of just like this weariness that no one else quite gets other than you. It’s like you never quite have that kinship ever again with anyone.

Kate: I think it’s like a sugar buzz high feeling all the time.

Dolly: That’s exactly what it is. But that’s something that I think is so magic about female friendship that I think boys have it who grew up together a bit. But I think women have it where it’s like if you’ve known a woman since you were a teenager, you have access to an eternal girlhood. Like the other day, a few weeks ago, me and all my closest friends and we all have known each other since we were teenagers, we went away for the weekend and it was ostensibly for very grown-up reasons. We were all stressed in our own very grown-up ways and we all just were like, let’s just get away for a weekend. And we were all kind of talking about very grown-up things. Sometimes you just like zoom out and you can’t believe that you and your friends are like,

Kate: Yeah.

Dolly: Talking about these proper actual fucking real life problems when you’ve had so many years of not, or not problem, pressures. Anyway, on the last night in this hotel, we just went rabid, we just, I don’t know what happened. We went to this lovely restaurant, and we got in the taxi back to the hotel, and it was like screaming and laughing. Karaoke. The taxi driver just looked like dead behind the eyes, this poor man. And then we got back to the hotel and it was like loads and loads of cocktails. I insisted. Everyone took their clothes off. We were singing to Sean Paul, jumping up and down on the bed. We thought the bed broke. And then we got a call from the hotel manager being like, look, there have been some complaints you have to stop. And I was just like, What the hell? I’m 35. How the hell has this happened? It was just like, I think I could be doing this when I’m 65. And it’s not. I just think it’s so much, it’s like getting in a time machine.

Kate: Yes. Yes. Man, that’s so good. Eternal girlhood. Because the feeling of witness only works if they’ve been a witness to a lot of stuff. But it’s that, it’s the feeling always. Like they give you, they give you like a little sentence. They give you a little clue and then I don’t know. And then you just kind of keep building on almost the same. It’s like, feels like building on the same joke forever.

Dolly: Yeaj totally it is that and actually, like that long, long history I think I’m so, I’m now 35. I’m really feeling the benefit in the value of all of that history and that and it’s hard work as well friendship sometimes, how much that has accumulated to be something that is incomparable to anything else in my life. When my first book published, it was an amazing time and it was a very stressful time because in the year, the couple of years afterwards, I hadn’t been at all prepared for how enormous it was going to be. And it was very exciting and it changed my life in every single way. But it was also incredibly exposing and destabilizing. I didn’t realize I would be perceived by so many people. I think the perception of me, rather than just the ingesting of a story, I hadn’t quite-

Kate: Literally the feeling like, you’re going to read this?

Dolly: Yeah, and have thoughts about me. Like that’s what I hadn’t-

Kate: You came to conclusions, but you don’t know me? That’s weird.

Dolly: I remember being a bit like that after the memoir came out being like, you know, everyone just thinks they know me. And it’s like I’ve basically asked people to spend 12 pounds to sit and read the entire story of my life. And if they don’t have a conclusion on me that is exactly fitting with what I think about myself and my choices, then I’m going to get angry that they don’t know me. But anyway, as you can tell, it was a quite tangled up time a couple of years after pretending about love. I was with one of my friends, Belle. We lived together for years and years and years, in our 20s. She’s what was one of the first people I met at university. You’ve known each other since we were 18. And I remember saying to her, in a low moment, I’d had some criticism for something and I was feeling like a backlash was something. And I remember saying, like, I feel like I don’t really deserve any of this success. I feel like kind of fraudulent. And I had had very bad anxiety those couple years. I wasn’t sleeping very well. And and she said, I’m not going to let you do this because I have been with you the whole time. I was with you when we lived in Camden and you had an office job and you would come back home and you would set your laptop and write and eat your dinner in front of your laptop. I was with you when you first started drafting this when you were 25 and our living room was covered in Post-Its. I was with you when we were 18 at uni and you were like writing plays and writing for the school magazine. And she was like, you can tell whatever story you want yourself. But I was a witness to what happened. So whenever you need to be told that this is absolutely everything that you deserve and was always going to be what happened to you, I’m here to tell you because I’ve been here the whole time and it just meant so much to me. It was amazing. And there’s I can’t say that to myself for whatever reason. Yeah, but I’ll let you say that.

Kate: Yes, sometimes I feel like that’s 20% of my brain. The things that I can’t possibly say about myself. And that’s a big percentage. A solid one out of five, of things where and and I’ll forget it so fast. But just that feeling of being mirrored back with love, I’m like, there it is again. Right, right, right. And you wouldn’t want to repeat it over and over again to a stranger. But when they know they kind of even just like, yeah. And it sounds like the both extremes are the absolutely necessary parts. Like especially when we have a wonderful thing happen, we need them to say, I know we feel uncomfortable about the word deserve, but you do deserve this. I know your temptation is actually to feel bad. It feels strange sometimes to feel wonderful. Let yourself be glad. You know, all that spectrum. And then the horrible subbasement of the subbasement, which is you are not the bad thing. I’m so sorry this happened to you. Things will change. I know this feels permanent, but like that shifting feeling of the witness means I don’t know it kinda takes the knife’s edge off both the very bad and the very good.

Dolly: Totally. And like my friend Caroline, whenever she’s having a freakout or I’m having a freakout, you’re having these big, intrusive thoughts. She said that when I describe it to her, it’s like, I think there’s a ghost in my house. And she was like, that’s how I feel about you. And it’s like, I know Caroline doesn’t have a ghost in her house, do you know what I mean? Like, you know when someone’s like they think they have a ghost in their house. It’s like, no, you don’t. But, you know the reality is everything’s fine. But you so understand, when it’s your house, you’re like, it’s definitely a ghost.

Kate: Yeah.

Dolly: And that’s, I think, such, so now we really have this way of being like, she’ll be talking to me about something that’s like, really worrying. That’s crazy that she’s invented. And I’ll just be like, I’m going to validate this because I know it’s real for you, but I know there’s no ghost.

Kate: That’s so good!

Dolly: You house is fine, actually.

Kate: I know your house, I’ve opened every door.

Dolly: And that was actually a really, really useful analogy that we still use.

Kate: I really like that. It also helps me because Chelsea is desperately afraid of the supernatural.

Dolly: Is she?

Kate: I do find that the more liberal someone becomes, this is my theological theory about denominations, is sometimes the more liberal someone becomes, they don’t mean to, but they accidentally are like well, I’m not really sure then what I believe, so I definitely accidentally have to believe in ghosts.

Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I wanted to ask you, too, about your parents, because they have one of those deeply annoying, loving relationships in which they enjoy each other’s company and stare into each other’s eyes at times. What do you think you learned about love from being their kid?

Dolly: It’s been such a double edged sword, that love story. It’s so amazing in so many ways. It’s obviously very stable, which is lovely. I understand that most people don’t have that, so I know what a privilege that is. And I think it allows you to dare to dream for something quite grand from love that I think you get to an age where a lot of people I know became very pragmatic about love, which I also think is totally fine, that pragmatism is never really factored in for me with my choices of romance, ever. But I like that there’s a sense of grandeur for me and what love is and who can become when you love someone and what you can give to them and what you can create together. I feel very romantic about that because of my mum and dad. I also think it has made me have an almost impossible standard for what I think love should be. I think it’s fed into my fantasism which is not great, even though that’s how I make my money and pay my mortgage. It’s not a great part of my, it’s a weakness in my personality, I think is my resistance to live in reality and my parents in their, I’m going to say this as loving as possible, in their love for each other and their love the story of them, they have definitely created a very intricate bubble and myth about their love for each other. And I don’t know if that’s been hugely helpful for me.

Kate: I totally hear you, where they’re like and that’s how it was always going to be. And you’re like I don’t feel like everyone anyone drop that anvil in my life.

Dolly: Yeah.

Kate: I guess I just have to wait for the anvil to hit me.

Dolly: Yeah, yeah. That’s such a good way of putting it. It’s like. I mean, the other good thing that has made me realize is my parents are so like a rom-com, like they’re so cinematically structured, their relationship, because they both met, my mom was in their early 30s, my dad’s in his early 40s. They both were kind of war torn from love in various ways. They both hated each other when they first met each other and they are both completely incompatible. My mom is extremely left wing. My dad is extremely right-wing, well not extremely right-wing, but he’s right-wing.

Kate: Yeah.

Dolly: I’m so, I was always so ready to be totally surprised, I think by who I could fall in love with. And that’s a good lesson to learn. You know, I’ve got some friends who are really quite type-A about it has to be, they have to be this, this, this and this. And I, I think I was quite I was more open to being surprised.

Kate: That’s so lovely. There is another love I wanted to ask you about because this one has not been my ideal. This is like love of body. I was just trying to be a brain in my twenties. I really wanted to have a certain job, and I didn’t pay any attention to how I felt to the point where I became really unwell. And then I became very unwell in a different way because I got cancer. And then it was like nine abdominal surgeries later, I felt like I was supposed to be very grateful to be alive, that I couldn’t possibly want a nice shirt or want to care about how I look, or wouldn’t that make me a bad person? And I, the way that you write about trying to create a loving relationship with your body is, I mean, in a very intense way, relatable. And it’s also, it sounds so loving to me, that push pull where sometimes we can only love parts of who we are and we’re tolerating the rest, what they call body neutrality. They’re just trying to work their way into better language. But I found your description of that push pull really real.

Dolly: Thank you. It’s been like such a long, long relationship. I’m kind of obsessed with bodies I think. I’m obsessed with my body and obsessed with other people’s bodies. I’ve always been like that since I was a child. I’m obsessed with what we do with our bodies and obsessed with what’s expected of people at certain ages or certain weights or whatever. And also, I think I’m interested in this fact that. This is our vehicle to experience the world, and it’s the only one that we get. But you’re talking about being beloved to yourself. This is so sacred, this thing’s so magical, this incredible vessel that is going to be the thing that allows me to love and fight and like, yeah, smell and get to know someone and see culture and opera and it should be nothing but loving that relationship, actually. And it never is. It’s very rare that it is, or it would take you such a long time to get there.

Kate: It does.

Dolly: I could talk about bodies forever. But interestingly, I’m so interested what you said about how your relationship changed and how there was a conversation about what your relationship with your body was after extreme illness. Because the most recent things that I think is really help with this ongoing healing that I’m doing for the rest of my life, of learning to be like respectful and loving to this vessel is one of my best friends, had nearly died last year because she had it, it was she was post birth. She had always suffered from Crohn’s her whole life, and Crohn’s was like hidden. She had a flare up in pregnancy, which was hidden because it mirrors pregnancy symptoms and obviously like there is never enough understanding of women’s bodies in medicine and how and anyway, she had surgery and she had a stomen that was fitted and life-changing. And I remember the first time she came for dinner at mine in the first month, she was so grateful just to be alive and to have the baby and to be sat with me in my kitchen. And then afterwards she said to me, I wish I could give you this feeling. She said, I wish you could have this feeling about your body and not go through everything I’ve just gone through because I just feel, I just feel so like, I just love this thing and I just want every woman to feel this.

Kate: I love that answer. I love that answer. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. Your Farly love is so beautiful to me. And being part of her family was so important. And living through her lives and losses was so formative. Farly lost her sister so early. And then you were there with her through that massive, irreparable life change. I wonder if the love and loss is so close together in your mind that like, you just kind of understood early on how how costly love can be.

Dolly: That’s an amazing question the way that you have phrased that. I think they live so close together. For me, I have an F tattooed on my wrist and it is for Farly. But I think I also got it for Florence as well, which was the name of her sister. It’s ten years since she died this year. I mean, here’s the thing, I’ve lived a very blessed life. I’ve had very little serious trauma. And I feel very, very lucky for that. I was 25, 26 when Florence got ill. Farly was a similar age. Florence was 19. Farly and I at that point had already been best friends for 15 years. And, you know, I’d grown up with Florence. I remember I had decided to go freelance for the first time, and it totally coincided with Florence going into hospital. And the hospital was on Tottenham Court Road, which was a 20-minute bus from my house in Camden. And I remember thinking, and this is probably my God-hungry-ness. I remember thinking like, this was always the plan. I was always meant to have this time where I wasn’t in an office even though I wasn’t ready to go freelance and I was I was really struggling with making it work. It was, someone was looking down on me because it meant she was signed off work because Florence was so sick. She needed to be in the hospital every day and I would just get on a bus and go to this hospital every day. And I, it definitely felt like when you have shared memories that relate to death, particularly child death, which is what Florence was, even though she officially wasn’t. You know, Farly and I have seen stuff together, and we’ve had conversations that I can’t even begin to describe how horrifying the stuff is that we shared. Horrifying in how deeply sad it was.

Kate: It  goes into a impossible place.

Dolly: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes we talk about it and sometimes we don’t. I think that has added a sense of preciousness to our bond. I think it’s added a sense of understanding the fragility of things. I think that it’s given us a huge depth of feeling for each other and understanding of each other. We were always close and we always will be close in a way that I think some people maybe kind of don’t understand simply because we’re so different. But I think you’re totally right in a long winded way. I’m just kind of thinking aloud. I think that something about us going through that so, well, her going through that when she was so young and me being privy to that is something I’ll never be able to replicate with any other person, I think.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That just reminded me of the word, the witness. One of the words comes from the Greek word of both like to see, but also to co-suffer. To have, like, to really be there. And to live the cost with somebody.

Dolly: Yeah. I remember at one point, I actually never told Farly this, she won’t mind me saying on the podcast, she’s a very open person. I remember after Florence died, it was in December, right before Christmas, and I went to the house, the family house the next day. And then I was there for the week before the funeral. And I stayed with her and I remember it was very heavy, but it was a total honor. And I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. But, you know, for someone who’s had a very charmed life, this was big stuff to, you know, Farly’s dad, I remember, understandably, his daughter had just died, I remember seeing him, like, cry. I’d, like, saw him cry when I went into the house the day afterwards, and he just crumbled into my arms. I hadn’t had a man, a middle aged man, cry in my arms before. It was like a lot to process. And I remember saying to my mom, I did have plans for New Year’s Eve and it just didn’t feel right that I should go, and I said, do you think I should go be with Farly’s family? And she said, you absolutely should be. You should offer that. And I remember saying to mom, I don’t know if I can do it like, it feels so big to be with this grieving family that just lost that child and I feel so ill equipped for it. And I remember my mom saying this is the unwritten vow of friendship. This is the sickness and health. This is the for better or worse. She was like it’s not just you and Farly giggling at home when we were teenagers. It’s not just going to parties. She will do this for you. And it doesn’t matter whether you feel equipped or not. Doesn’t matter if you feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re going to fuck it up. This is the unsaid vow. You’ve got you can’t just take the fun stuff. You have to be there right now.

Kate: I hope this is not weird. I was just going to give it to you after, but I got Florence’s yearbook quote, I got it made into a print because I thought it was so lovely and my lovely Chelsea was going through like, a one of those situations where I thought, if she doesn’t go through it in a certain way, it will break something in her and it will be hard to see. It was so hard to see a thing that is let go. And so I, I read her that beautiful quote from Florence, and then I got it made into a print.

Dolly: Do you know, something that brings me so much happiness is one of the most quoted quotes on Goodreads for my books is Florence’s yearbook page. In fact, I think it is the most quoted from Everything I Know About Love. And all she wants to do is be a writer.

Kate: Aw lovey.

Dolly: So it means so much to me. Can you believe an 18-year-old wrote this?

Kate: Would you read it for me?

Dolly: Yeah, of course. Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you’re doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you. How can an 18-year-old know to say that? She would have been nearly 30 now, I think all the time about what the work would have been that she would make, you know. And I think that’s the other thing that helps when I’m being like a whiny little bitch about people being mean about me on Twitter or whatever it is that I’ve found so difficult and fucking ridiculous over the last few years, which has come with this amazing career that I’ve had that I’ve been so lucky to have. Something that really helps with that is just thinking about the work that she wasn’t allowed to make in the career she wasn’t allowed to have. I just so feel her with me all the time. Every time a huge career thing happens, I feel her punching the air. I went in, I remember going into the hospital and she couldn’t speak at this point, I just been given my first column for the Sunday Times. I was 26, and I remember going in and Farly saying, Dolly, she’s got this amazing news. She’s going to be writing a column for The Sunday Times. And she couldn’t speak, but she just, like, punched the air with her fist. And it’s like such a trite thing to say, but it is always the most obvious things that the most wise isn’t, I just I whenever I’m feeling wingy about work stuff in particular, I just think I get, I get to do it. You know how lucky we. This is so beautiful. Thank you.

Kate: I think it’s really beautiful that the person who then, like, keeps teaching through you keeps teaching in her own words and through you. There’s that lovely bell hooks quote that I’ll ruin but it’s, it’s the feeling that there is no safety in love. That love is so many things, but it is not safe.

Dolly: Yeah, so true.

Kate: So what is it she said, let yourself run away with your feelings like let them. Because you’re going to be changed every time. And then the idea that we can just keep changing every time someone loves us sounds like the most hopeful thing. Dolly, I like you so very much. It’s embarrassing, and I’m kind of sweaty about it.

Dolly: This has been a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much.

Kate: Thank you.

Kate: It’s also just worth saying that it’s very hard to nurture friendships, especially into adulthood. I really like that joke that goes, no one tells you that the greatest miracle is that Jesus had 12 close friends in his 30s. That’s pretty good. I mean, some of us are dripping with children and caregiving responsibilities for parents and people in our lives. And some people have so many responsibilities. Responsible responsibilities is their middle name that really just keeps them from fun activities that maybe they used to enjoy. Sometimes we just get buried in our email inbox again and again. And then people just stop inviting us. We used to love to host. Maybe we used to love to have coffee dates or regular catch-ups over FaceTime. But we haven’t done it in a long time. So if that’s you and if you’ve listened to this conversation and wish that you had a little more room for friendship in your life, maybe now is a good time to begin. Is there a book club you’ve been hoping to join? Maybe you could just say a friendly hi to a person down the hall or in a cubicle across the way. Maybe you want to take a note out of Dolly’s book and reach out to that old friend you haven’t caught up with in years to revive that eternal girlhood we all have inside of us. Florence has wisdom for us all. Like she said, you were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you. Because how lucky are we? We get to do this. Bear witness to the lives of our friends and invite them to bear witness to ours. Every beautiful, terrible moment of it. It’s better together, isn’t it? I sure think so.

Kate: All right. Your turn. Did your bestie make a conjunctivitis scavenger hunt? I want to hear your weird friendship stories. Write me a note on social media. I’m @katecbowler. Or leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. And before you go, could you leave us a review on Apple or Spotify? I know I’m using my school teacher voice. I would love it. I would love it so much. It really helps people find the show. And a big thank you to my team and our partners for all the work they put into this episode. Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School are our champions all the time. This podcast is really my favorite thing that I get to do with other people. All my love goes to Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azario, and Katherine Smith. You are my everything. I’ll talk to you next week, my loves. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.