Kate Bowler: There’s a kind of love we almost never write songs about. It doesn’t get the wedding or anniversary card. And it rarely gets the deathbed scene in a movie. And yet, if you ask most of us to name the people who actually made us, who taught us how to laugh, who taught us how to apologize, who saw us before we knew how to be seen, who found us maybe, in the strange world of childhood, and said, I’m here, are you? You might not name a spouse or a parent. I think you might name a friend. Friends are one of the enormous gifts of being alive. It asks for no ceremony, no official vows, and yet somehow it can ask almost everything of us. It shows up in kitchens and group chats and long walks with no destination, and it stitches us, almost without our noticing, into the fabric of a life worth having. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. My guest today is Andrew O’Hagan. He is a Scottish novelist and an essayist whose books include Mayflies, Caledonian Road, The Illuminations, and Be Near Me. He grew up in Ayrshire where he and his best friend used to signal like with flashlights to each other at night. And it just like opened up this obsession in him about the magic of friendship. And he has spent the rest of his life paying attention to the friendships that make us who we are. He’s been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Come on people, give this to him already. He writes for the London Review of Books. He counts legendary writers like Seamus Henney and Edna O’Brien among his friends. He helped start a cafe in London with his friend because he believes friendship needs a place to gather. He is a complete wonder and I cannot wait to talk to him. Andrew, I am so excited that you’re here. Welcome to Everything Happens.
Andrew O’Hagan: Hi Kate, it’s so good to see you.
Kate Bowler: I am thrilled and I want to talk about where, you know, the very, very beginning, which is the earliest bits of childhood. There is always a friend who feels less like somebody that you met and more like someone you immediately recognize as your own. And I wonder who that first friend was for you.
Andrew O’Hagan: You know, I couldn’t wait to meet my best friend. I’m one of those kids who look to my parents thinking, is this as good as it gets? I mean, are these guys going to be in my face forever? Or can I like meet somebody else that I chose? I didn’t choose my parents, I had nothing, no say. And they’re always telling me off, they’re always putting me places, like sit there. So anyway, I met this guy called Mark, same age as me, hilarious, a rebel. He was at war with everybody, especially the teachers, especially the parents. And I thought, I love you, Mark. You are my mate. Let’s never end this thing. Of course, once you’re about eight, you never see them again. But you know, that’s where it stops. I love a friendship.
Kate Bowler: That’s so true, though, about almost like the hunger to meet someone. I have this very sweet little moment of the day where my son and I pray together. And one of his very earliest prayers was like, God, when will you introduce me to my soul friend? And it was so sincere. And I was like no, I get it, dude. Like that’s, that’s what we’re looking for here.
Andrew O’Hagan: I mean, I’ve gone too far on this, even as a parent, you know, I got a 22 year old, my darling Nell, and I do ask her really, really horrendous questions still, like, you sure you need to go out with your friends, what about me? Or you know nightclubs aren’t really that good, it’s not as much fun as having dinner with dad. That’s like amazing. She’s like, you got to get some friends. I know you write books about it and everything, but you’re getting sad at this point. Yeah, it’s been on the agenda for a while, I think. Friendship, you know, with your children, it’s a big debate, isn’t it? Some people say, don’t pretend to your children that you’re their best friend. I go the opposite direction. I’m like, you’re going to meet some other people. I mean, they will let you down. Don’t doubt that, but daddy never will. Cause I’m your best friend. It’s like the ultimate needy parent.
Kate Bowler: I totally agree. That should never, that could never be overdone. It’s like you’ve got me for life and like we could make that more important than it needs to be.
Andrew O’Hagan: Poor, poor Nell, my daughter’s like going to the school disco and I’m like rugby tackling her to the ground saying, they’re all liars, they’ll just let you down. She’s like, can you leave me go now? My friends are at the front door. I think I need some help with this. This is why I’m on here, Kate. I think you can help me.
Kate Bowler: This is actually an intervention. Welcome. I am uncredentialed and only historical, but I’m here for you. It did remind me of my very first friend friend was this girl I met named Lindsay, and her dad was an entomologist. So her whole basement was full of bugs behind glass, which was the weirdest, kookiest, most interesting place to be. We got chicken pox together. Which was an important rite of passage. And when she moved away to New Zealand, this is from Winnipeg, Manitoba, so I was like, we will never see each other again. I’m not sure where New Zealand is. I went to my parents’ piano and I brought my tape deck and pressed record and I played a very touching rendition of Brian Adams, everything I do, I do it for you. Of course. Do, do, do. And then put it in an envelope and it probably took about two months just for her to receive it.
Andrew O’Hagan: You’re my kind of friend, it’s like over-commit for life. I had this friend called Anne in like what we call primary two, you’re like sort of seven years old and she moved to Leicester and I like sort went into a sort of decline. My mother’s like, he’s lost all color and all taste for food and he keeps writing in his journal. I’m like, it is all about Anne. She left me. One sec. Less of the gone with the wind. You’re seven. Go play. This is pre-adolescent. Imagine how it got worse. I love the idea of hanging on to people from quite a young age. But I think it does mean a lot to you at that time because you’re finding out just what it’s all about, aren’t you? You’re sort of It’s less about the friend really than about you. You’re trying to assert yourself a little bit and say, oh, I’m going to take up some space now in the world. And the first thing I’m gonna do is form a gang. They’re gonna be my people, you know? And my mother, even when I was a teenager, felt that I’d set up this colossal opposition party. My friends. And she had to go into debate with them on a daily basis. It was like the presidential debate about whether I could or couldn’t go out to play football. You know, in terms of course have a glamor that your parents just never do. Maybe later in years I was close to my mom and you know gave my mom dad a lot of you know devotion later on, but as a teenager they were just the uncoolest people in the universe. They were designed to be uncool in some way. Friends had all the groove. I don’t know why.
Kate Bowler: My dad has this amazing habit of being increasingly formal the younger the person is. So if you’re a baby, it would just be like, and a good day to you, sir. But he still doesn’t say like, I love you. He says, I will follow your career with interest.
Andrew O’Hagan: Yeah. I had the kind of exact reverse for a certain point in my teenage years, I started talking to my parents as if I was a kind of 17th century dandy and it was during the new romantic period, I’m older than you, it was like all the boys were wearing makeup, they all had stripes across their face, we were Adam and the Ants, I was really big into Adam and the Ants and I’d be like, tush tush Peter, my carriage awaits, my accomplices and I will be repairing to the nearest hostel reef for a beer and I was like, what are what are you talking about? Like a totally Scottish working class guy, like what did I, what did I bring into the world? Why is this guy talking like Beau Brummell? I did it for about a year. My parents wanted to divorce me. It was really good….Here’s the thing, Kate, do you think female friendships are different from male ones in your observation?
Kate Bowler: I have found that there is a particular quality that a friend of mine started saying, or yelling, anytime we did something, especially if it was slightly dangerous, we would yell, I will be a witness to your life! And it was this, like, the minutiae of the accounting, and then being kind of the choir, they’ll be like, but didn’t he say that before? Or like, she always does that. And then like, affirmation of no detail too granular felt like you don’t like, I don’t even know why I wrote memoirs all these years. I have female friends.
Andrew O’Hagan: Yeah. I really love the way that women have taught men. I think nowadays men know how to talk to each other because of women. When I was growing up there was a whole thing about women express their feelings, men go quiet and sullen and stare at their shoes, which was broadly speaking quite true. But then the difference between my father’s generation and mine, I would say, is that we really listened to the women who were our friends and became much more like them. You know this kind of dialog my father could never have had. My father, just let me be clear, my father in his whole life, he’s dead now, never once had lunch with a woman on his own who wasn’t my mother, or dinner, or went to the cinema, or went through the race, or did anything in the street. My father had no female friends and the idea of something like me going endlessly to lunch or going out with women who aren’t my wife and who are some of my oldest friends. I’ve got as many women friends as men. My father was always like, nah, there’s something you’re not telling me. You’re sleeping together, right? No, we’re not. She’s completely not interested in me, Dad, and that’s not what it is. Nah, it’s going to happen eventually. His understanding was completely old fashioned male. I think friendship has changed enormously because we became kind of, I suppose feminists. We thought of ourselves among all the politics we were into in the 80s, you know, hating Margaret Thatcher and campaigning for the miners and hating apartheid, we were also becoming feminists. We’re watching the women in our lives and how they dealt with intimacy, trust, community, sharing and it was different and that’s a big change I reckon.
Kate Bowler: Yes. I imagine the kind of emotional fluency that those relationships gave you, kind of painted in a lot of colors for them what was possible with people that another generation would have declared impossible.
Andrew O’Hagan: It’s exactly that and it’s an aspect of friendship but also about caring and being in a kind of caring relationship, generally. For example, I know you know about this Kate, I’ve been wanting to ask you whether when you’re ill and you’re recovering do people who you know come at you and want to support you and what to help you tend to be women or did you find it to be genderless? That way, because, Keith, a great friend of mine, who inspired my novel Mayflies and who I write about in this book, he was as much attended to and sympathized with and kind of rebuilt, if you like, to the extent that he could be rebuilt by the men in his life. And that, again, that was different. My father’s generation, when someone was ill, was to say a prayer for them and go silent. Not to mention it, because it was embarrassing. Difficult, you know, but that embarrassment and that difficulty is something that I feel my generation wants to make contact with head-on. And the person who’s sick might say do you know what today? I just want to be silly and talk about movies. I don’t want to talk about myself or my illness, but equally you might say, thanks, let’s get into this. What do you reckon, what was it like for you?
Kate Bowler: I grew up Mennonite, which has a pretty, it really carried a pretty strong gender divide. Every time we’d say, oh, Mennonite rules, we’re always, we were always just saying boys at one table, girls at another. There’s just like a default setting in which, um, and then most of the food culture, the reaching out usually goes to women. So because I’m an immigrant, I was sick in a country where I didn’t have family. I didn’t really, I couldn’t bring any of my old friendships with me. So, and I was really one of the only women in a, I mean, academia is a gerontocracy of us. So it’s not just men, it’s like older men. And I think some of the most moving things I experienced was watching the like sincerity dug out of people that surprised me, because it was so tender and it also, for some people, looked like it was their first try, at like really loving somebody that they were scared to lose. And so I had this old man friend who even wasn’t that old, but we both, it was my Dean and we both got, we both got a stage four cancer diagnosis during the same month and watching him have to unveil an emotional vocabulary that he wasn’t used to and me just kind of wandering around with all my feelings. But one of the sweetest things was a male colleague wasn’t sure what to say, so he wrote me a poem and he had it published and then he had it framed and he gave it to me all wrapped up in brown paper and it was called Bats in the Attic about how this strange sociability of imagining all these bats in the attic as like the imagination of death and how we have to find a kind of strange, almost friendly piece, with something that would otherwise scare us. It was, it was like…
Andrew O’Hagan: It was a gift!
Kate Bowler: It was an unbelievable! I thought it was, I just, if I hadn’t been that sick and I hadn’t been that undone, I wouldn’t have seen other people be that vulnerable in their, in their best efforts.
Andrew O’Hagan: You see, I think that’s what friendship is, in a way. It’s being imaginative about other people’s needs. You know, responding without being told to what they might need. Actually using your inventive powers and going in among it and saying, I’m gonna think of a thing to do here. I’m going to get properly engaged with this. You know, my friend Keith, when he got his cancer diagnosis, he turned to me one day and he said, I don’t want any of this traditional, silent, Scottish male, you know, working class removal. I want you all in here with me. You know, I’m not going to make it, he said. And I want to go down with you all. And where he really explored with us was that all that friendship and childhood, all that going to gigs and loving the bands of the 80s, and traveling on buses to see the Smiths and thinking that this is the height of our lives…that actually meant something. It was cash in the bank for later on in life when we were going to need to make a withdrawal, we were gonna lean on each other, that there was almost a moral obligation to help each other across the line if there was going to be a line to get across. And let’s face it, ultimately there is a line that we all have to get across. You know, thankfully, certainly in your case and in many others, it didn’t come too soon but it did for Keith. He was only 51. And he needed to be helped. In his case he wanted to go to Dignitas, he wanted to be assisted into his death rather than be at the mercy of this undignified process of dying without any control. And I know there’s a lot of debate about that and we’re not going to argue it out today but I can just tell you that it was based in our childhood friendship, the notion that we might listen to him and help him towards that dignity, almost lift him across the finishing line. And that was a different expectation of friendship than any I’d ever conceived of when I was young.
Kate Bowler: Wow. I’m just extending that feeling of imagination like that it would then get you to walk forward, ever forward, to a place no one has been. Which is of course like no, I always remember people saying well, what’s it, you know, what heaven like? And I was like, oh no, no, and I haven’t died yet. Like none of us have ever done this before everywhere. Everywhere we’re going, none of us have ever been.
Andrew O’Hagan: That’s the thing, Kate, I mean, friendship is always an experiment in the unknown. You may think you know the person and you can rely on all your old jokes and the old lingo and the reliable stories and the people you hate and the things that were observed. And you can share all these wonderful stories. But actually, the friendship only moves forward because the two of you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But it’s a trust that you have, that you’re in step. It’s being in step that makes it so beautiful that somehow one of you is going to go before the other. One of them’s parents is going to go before the other’s parents. There’s going to be things with the children. There’s gonna be things with money, there’s gonna be things with ambition and careers. And God, you’re gonna have to put your shoulder to the wheel for each other. And it’s using the imagination that’s gonna be required of you. That is really the defining thing in the end of it, whether you’re a good friend or not. Cause you just can’t, you don’t know what’s going to be the next claim on you. I’ve got friends who didn’t end up in the place with me that I would have said they would. You even end up being closer friends with people, ou know that way that if you had to pick them out at school, you wouldn’t have picked these two. You might have picked that one, but that one’s going miles away. Whilst these quieter friends who didn’t seem quite so hot back in the day turned out to be amazing in friendship. They’re amazing when there’s children to consider. They’re amazing when there’s a financial crisis. They’re amazing when there’s death in the family. That person steps into a kind of unknowable limelight. At some point in your life. And it’s really amazing to watch.
Kate Bowler: Yes. Weird stars of the show. Yeah. I’ve always loved that image. I think I just picked up on it when I’ve had seasons of being really scared. And it’s very hard for people to match up with you because they don’t know how much hope to have. Too much hope can be poisonous and push you too far ahead. Too little hope you feel like you have to drag them along with you and be like, actually, like I’m trying here and I need you to help create momentum for me to try. But I loved that feeling that like, if there’s somebody just trying to keep pace with you, that’s always my best promise I can give to someone I really love is like, don’t worry. Like I’m watching your pace. I’ll do my very best to like keep in sync.
Andrew O’Hagan: Absolutely. It’s a balancing act, I guess, trying to establish that zone where recognizing that it’s happening to them doesn’t divorce itself from the truth that it is also happening to you. Obviously the person who thinks it’s all happening to him is a nightmare. You don’t want them either.
Kate Bowler: Yes, you don’t.
Andrew O’Hagan: It was a balance, isn’t it? Somebody who’s like, they know it’s happened to you and they can travel as far as possible into that space that you’re in but they also know that they can’t finally pretend that it’s their trouble and I find that balance to be instinctive with people the people who know how to do it are your best friends. Who will never leave you feeling overwhelmed by their care for you or underwhelmed by their actual interest. It’s a sort of weird nuance. I don’t know, we grew up in the 20th century with a really horrible notion, it was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who came up with the phrase that became very popular with teenagers in the 20 century, and still is, and the phrase was, hell is other people. I don’t think hell is other people, I think heaven is other, people you know, hell is having nobody else, hell is it just being you. I think anybody who’s faced a real crisis knows that fear that you were talking about, at least some of it, must come from the fear that you’re just on your own. It’s you in the void and that must be a sort of hell, and if there’s other people there there’s the possibility of a conversation that’s not just in your own head. And I’ve always tried to write about that, you know, the communication that is there in friendship and as a novelist it’s always what’s interested me. The secrets in a family that you’re trying to bridge, you’re trying to supreme into the open. There’s beauty and heartbreak in those things, bringing the secrets forward, but friendship depends on the maintaining of secrets as well as overcoming them, I think.
Kate Bowler: To ask you about unusual friends, too, because you had this lovely friend Edna O’Brien who became a very formative friend. And we have these very surprising friendships sometimes with people from other generations. It’s like they came from another planet when they’re describing how they grew up or the songs they like or maybe they’re already legends by the time we meet them. I wonder, what is it about that friendship with Edna that maybe no one your age could have given you?
Andrew O’Hagan: Well, it was amazing because it really put the final lie to that notion that you can only really be friends with people of your own generation. Edna was 40 years older than me. I met her when I was about 40 and she was 80. You know, we met outside a party and we just looked at each other and started talking and after a few minutes we mutually agreed that we were going to be great friends and I invited her to dinner that Tuesday, the Tuesday after the night I met her and booked a restaurant and she came, you know fantastically dressed and all these sort of velvet weeds she kind of wore. This great queen of Irish literature sort of arrived in this restaurant and so, you hovered across to the table and sat down and just immediately was hilarious about herself, about her past, about all the people we knew in common, wise about writing, about what good writing did in a person’s life, how it really made you fully live, to have on paper a kind of friendship, a correspondence with your own heart thoughts, your own mental journeys that you could you could be fully buoyed up and fully fleshed out constantly by the good writing that was in front of you. She was brilliant talking about that and she gave me a kind of companionship then for nearly 20 years. Edna died in her 90s, so it was 15 or more years in fact friendship and she just related to me on a purely human level. We weren’t the same generation. She was born, you know, before the Second World War. It was, that was well behind me by the time I was born in 1968. It was amazing to see how, how natural we were as friends though. Because she, she could lean on me and I could lean on her and we could talk about anything. She’s incapable of being boring. She was demanding by the way, I mean in the way that people can be, good friends can be demanding, but we grow to quite like the demands, don’t you think? I mean you’re always hearing people saying, oh my god, he’s such a pain, he just he’s on me all the time, he wants stuff. But I quite like people who want stuff. If you can, if you can provide it and the task is to try to provide it. Edna would say to me, there’s a little chocolate shop in North London, Andrew. Now, would you go there? Look at this crunchy chocolate. It’s very, very nice and very expensive. Would you go today and bring it to me?
Kate Bowler: So like you don’t have a big job.
Andrew O’Hagan: I’d be like, I’ll just like throw everything off and, you know, I’d quite like the task. And that night we’d eat the chocolate and drink a glass of red wine and talk about, you know, anything under the sun. And I don’t know, the friendship was, was a very caring one and she taught me a lot, you know. In that traditional way that sometimes people who have been around that just that little bit longer, they know things. She knew things about love and relationships that… Well, we’re always grasping with, I guess. And she’d grasp with it. She once said to me, most writers should live alone, you know? Interruptions are the great enemy. She said, two things are the greatest enemy. She said interruptions and Prosecco.
Kate Bowler: Ha, ha, ha, ha! Prosecco!
Andrew O’Hagan: Yeah, she was a fan of Champagne, I’m afraid.
Kate Bowler: That’s so funny. I’ve had a lot of people in my life who’ve been significantly older that I’ve spent a lot of time with, but then sometimes I realize about three hours in that I just have a wonderful listening face and that they don’t know that much about me.
Andrew O’Hagan: There’s got to be questions. They’ve got to ask you a question. I think this is the role that you’re pointing to here, is that I’m a listener too. I can listen all day. I’m a writer, I love absorbing people’s stories. That’s what I do. And I try to magic them into the kind of sentences that people adore. That’s my job. But, if you’re with a person, elderly or not, for hours, a long weekend, a week in Italy, and they never ask a question, it’s a tell, like a tell in poker. You can tell they’re self-absorbed in a way that can’t be helped. Edna O’Brien, who I was talking about, was endlessly interrogating the people who were also listening to her. She would stop with startling questions. She’d say do you think cupid is our friend or our enemy? She’d say, I definitely think my enemy, cupid causes trouble. She would say you know things like that or she would say to you Andrew have you ever hated somebody so much you wanted to vomit?
Kate Bowler: You wrote something that I actually called my two best friends from home on a group chat and made them listen to this description of why I love them. So thank you for that. You wrote, in a nice self-disparaging way in which we talk about ourselves as writers and as people who absorb people’s stories, you wrote, I’d argue that writers have a rare but not unhelpful sickness. We wish to manage time. To conspire with life at the level of myth and to seek connections everywhere, which is why real camaraderie is so stabilizing. Sometimes our friends are the only characters we know who are not invented. And yet, friend of genius, you make a leap into enchantment that also feels like home. Oh my gosh, that sentence, the feeling that I know I didn’t invent this, and because I know that, you will continue to show up when I don’t imagine you, when I didn’t necessarily reach from you, when I can’t picture the scenario we’re gonna end up being. And it will be those familiar hands, like unloading a dishwasher, doing an errand, helping you reach a thought that you couldn’t have arrived at. There was something about like…the existence, the durability of people who can exist outside of our managing them that feels just, when you wrote it, I just felt so at peace.
Andrew O’Hagan: And that’s so important. So important. Peace is a big part of it for me, Kate, because, you know, I love my friends because I don’t know what they’re going to say next. I sort of do know what my characters and my fiction are going to see next. That’s my job to work out what they are going say next and make them say it. Or not say it, but let the reader hear it in another way. These are the tricks that I deal with every day. A good writer is managing silence and revelation all the time. But what a tonic! To be with a real flesh and blood person who you think well of as a friend because they are not subject to your mastery, they’re not subject to your manipulation. You’re not going to do what I want you to do, you’re not gonna say in a minute what I have fashioned for you to say. This is a real conversation even right now between us and I think of you as a friend now. Because I don’t know what you’re going to say and I will have to be on my toes, I’ll have to be fully alive, I’ll have to give my most present in a relationship here and that’s the glory of life. It’s beautiful and it’s the cornerstone of every great friendship by which also includes marriage by the way. You stop believing that the person you’re with is listenable to. Is unpredictable in their creative effort to be fully alive then you’ve lost it and you’ve lost them, lost them entirely.
Kate Bowler: I wanted to ask you about your friend, Sam, that you opened a cafe with in London. Oh, yeah. It just makes me think of the things that might happen if we open up other possibilities. So it was like, tell me about the premise of this cafe.
Andrew O’Hagan: Okay, so I can tell you, Kate, you’re looking officially at the worst businessman in the Western Hemisphere. I have no experience of business. I had never had a restaurant or a cafe. But my great friend, Sam Frears and I, we’d said to each other for a long time, we love to have like a really groovy cafe with a jukebox. We’d choose the menu, we’d choose the decor, it’d be like great fun, the music, we’d be in charge. And all our friends would come, and not at one point did anybody say and can we make money? Or can we not lose money? But anyway, we got this place together and we named it after my friend, it’s called Sam’s Cafe. It’s in North London and it’s just the best fun and it has a 1962 Rockola Princess jukebox. I don’t mind telling you. Yeah. My friend Keith, I mentioned, when he had cancer and he was really struggling, he was a great music fan and I gave him the task of choosing the 50 tracks, the 50 records that would go into this jukebox and he spent a whole winter sourcing these records from the 1980s and they’re now permanently inside that juke box at Sam’s Cafe. The whole institution is a kind of owe-it to friendship. The cafe was built on friendship, it’s run along friendship lines. And the jukebox was filled by my oldest friend’s musical taste. So when I go in there in the morning and I just see all these people in huddles, gossiping, you know, cheering, having their lives with each other, I think–with each other, that’s what it was all supposed to be about, you know.
Kate Bowler: I have some friends who started a cafe in Sweden around the Babette’s Feast model of that lovely story, right? In which this scandalous woman who makes wonderful food creates a community out of people who don’t always know how to gather. And I was just blown away by how countercultural it is right now to host, to find ways of creating phone-free connection. And just what a rare kind of sets of qualities it creates in people. Because so often we meet people, I mean, who just like, it’s as if they don’t have any of the skills of friendship or if they had them, they lost them along the way.
Andrew O’Hagan: You know, it’s so important that we recognize that sometimes your job as a friend is to remind people that they do have a friend. This happened the other day, you know, it was this woman, this middle-aged woman who’s suffering mental health problems, she’s walking around the area of North London where we live and have the cafe and it was raining outside and she was walking in the rain talking to herself and she was clearly in distress and brought her into the cafe, sat her down; I was just there on my own that morning, it was very early.
Found her a cup of tea and a piece of cake and she just looked at this piece of cake and started talking about herself and eating the cake and drinking the tea and it clearly had been a long time since somebody noticed themself to her as being a responsible person in her idea of friendship. I wanted her to know that she was safe in here. She was going to be okay. And, I don’t know, we get so soft, you know, covetous of friendship sometimes. We store our friends up. These are all my friends and I’ve got all the numbers on my phone and they’re on speed dial and they are my friends and they answer the call within two rings. You know, everybody gets a bit kind of pleased with themselves about their friendships. But I would remind listeners, you know friendship isn’t jewelry. It’s not a possession. It’s not a thing. It’s not a fancy car. It’s not a thing that you got as a reward for being a great person. You know, it’s an ongoing project that you’re lucky enough in each particular case to be invited in on. It’s a project, a work in progress, that you have to show good colors and good effort in relation to. And I get a bit disappointed when I see people going, yeah, I’ve got a thousand friends on my phone and 10 trillion followers on Instagram. And you think, you know, why are you counting? Have you got one of them that you would go out and rescue? Is there one of them who could depend on you if their mother was dying today? I hope so. I would hope so. But it’s not possession, you know.
Kate Bowler: I did like your whole treatment of how very confusing the word friend has now become as, to friend someone. But I guess the way I absorbed that lesson that you just described was that it’s much easier for people to send “heart heart heart” than to take the time to pick on you, disagree with you, get in the weeds of your life, that that shows more investment than the “heart heart heart.” But I really just feel like it’s very confusing to know if people even how people care about you.
Andrew O’Hagan: It’s so weird. Exactly. Exactly and turning the whole thing into a verb, I friend you. That kind of friendship is based in the idea that somebody is accumulating numbers and they live in fear. They pray to God that nobody will ever ask them to do anything to justify that friendship. I’ve friended you and that’s enough. I ticked you. That was it. That was the beginning, the middle, and the end of that story. Now I’m moving on. I want other friends, people who will friend me or who I will friend. But as that is a complete contradiction of what friendship is, a friendship is a sort of invisible contract, isn’t it? Where I can say, there’s some really crunchy, expensive chocolate in a place in North London.
Kate Bowler: Yes. So far away.
Andrew O’Hagan: Could you go there today and get it for me?
Kate Bowler: Could you go there today…my favorite.
Andrew O’Hagan: That was Edna O’Brien’s request, you know, there’s a bottle of wine that I had in a restaurant, I can’t find it, could you go on the net? You young people have got the net, could you go and find it? You know, I love a request. Friendship brings requests. So they should, you know, rather than this other thing. I’ve friended you, which means never, ever ask me to do anything for you. I don’t know you. I would never cross any threshold to please you. You know, it’s madness. I’m afraid that a lot of those, unfortunately, quite young people very often, who have got thousands of “friends” on social media are sitting in boxed bedrooms in Iowa or Saskatchewan or Dundee or outside Paris or somewhere in Turkey, alone, wishing they’d somebody to actually be face to face with, eyeball to eyeball, sharing the same oxygen in the same space, spontaneously not quite knowing what’s going to happen next. That’s friendship. It amazed me the other year to see a statistic from Facebook, the organization, admitting that a huge–multiples of tens of millions of people–who operate on Facebook and elsewhere on social media don’t actually exist at all. They’ve been friended and are busy friending people without actually being real entities at all, they’re either robots or fictions. People have invented them. So, you and I are talking about something that could almost be reckoned to be a bit old-fashioned. Flesh and blood friendship. Somebody who’s going to link arms with you on the day there’s a big funeral. Somebody who’s going to send a car for you when you’ve got a doctor’s appointment and you can’t get there and it’s raining and somebody’s letting you down and you’re feeling desperate. Do you know what I mean? It’s a thing. It’s a thing.
Kate Bowler: Yes. Yes. I was shocked to find that 20% of online traffic being bots are foreign interference. It’s such a distortive way of trying to figure out how much mediation, it’s not just like indirectness, it’s like actively being obfuscated by foreign entities or like, I just think the surrealness of that, where our town halls being these Facebook communities. Being really open access to all sorts of distortion, it really makes me want to take so much of those relationships, especially anything worth saying to someone that you really know, in an offline way so that there can be some kind of intimacy.
Andrew O’Hagan: I think it’s there, Kate, in your sensibility, you know, you invented it, it’s called everything happens. There’s something in that. It happens. It’s not called it might have happened or it probably didn’t happen. This is life happening. Everything happens. And to be interested in that, in the manifestation of life, it’s actually happening. The good stuff and the bad stuff, the real friends and the not real friends, the love affairs and the things that failed, you know, the triumphs and the disasters, everything happens. And those of us who want to believe in that, we see that friendship is a great boon, because if you get some of that happening, it is much nicer.
Kate Bowler: Andrew, this conversation has made me like fall in love again with all the playfulness and absurdity and like the belief that there are so many versions of us and and them–them, whoever they are–to discover that will make us so much more alive. Thank you for making friendship so beautiful today this was such a privilege.
Andrew O’Hagan: I’m grateful. And thanks for having me, Kate.
Kate Bowler: I keep thinking about something Andrew said about friendship, that friendship isn’t something we collect as proof that we are lovable, or interesting, or doing life correctly. It’s a project. Which is kind of annoying, because projects require something of us. They require us to text back or be inconvenienced or maybe do very specific errands and they ask us to notice when someone needs us to keep pace with them. Not rushing them toward hope or like popping in when it’s convenient for us. And maybe that’s part of what makes friendship so beautiful. Like we don’t actually know what we will eventually ask of one another. We just keep finding out. So, okay, as you know, I love to bless the crap out of you. So this is a blessing for friends who just keep showing up. Blessed are you who have found somebody who knows the long version of the story, who remembers who you were before this particular trouble arrived. And blessed are you still searching for your friendship soulmate. May you find people who don’t need you to be easier to love, who will keep pace when you are tired and draw closer when life demands more. And may we all be that kind of friend, too. Transformed by the loving and being loved, asking and being asked, showing up and staying all the way to the end. Thank you so much for listening, my dears. This was a really special conversation to me. And if it makes you think of anyone, a friend, someone you want to get to know better, someone you already love, just send this to them. Or also, maybe call them. Apparently friendship brings requests. I am also loving Substack right now. I would love it if you came and found me there. It’s like an old-school blog, except better. I’m at KateBowler.substack.com and I promise we have like the nicest corner on the internet. And hey, we’re also on YouTube, so you can watch all of these podcast conversations there at Kate C. Bowler. Everything Happens Studios is made possible through the generous support of Lily Endowment. And a huge thank you to my team, who does amazing things every day and they all make me laugh. This is Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton and Katherine Smith. Thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
