A conversation on love and childhood friendships with Kamila Shamsie

What do childhood friendships bring to our lives? And what are the challenges of trying to sustain them?

Before I became close to my childhood friend Caroline, she was – to use the melodramatic language of our teen years – the enemy. The boy I liked cheated on me with her, which, at the time, felt like an apocalypse. Until he went on to cheat on her with someone else – who also later became a beloved friend – and we were thrown together, united by heartache and rage. The love story I had been chasing wasn’t the one that was beginning. Life is wonderful like that. Sometimes it doesn’t give us what we want in the moment, and then gives us what we are not yet wise enough to want instead.

In the absence of the romantic love we’d chased and lost, Caroline and I formed a 26-year childhood friendship, which not only steadied us through the worst teenage moments (acne and being dumped), but provided a source of silliness. As we grew boobs and bums and the world started to see our bodies in a different way, here was a space in which we could giggle for hours watching Big Brother’s 24-hour live feed, put toothpaste on our spots, and be honest about the fact that we still slept with comfort blankets – a ‘raggy’ (hers) and a ’putty’ (mine). Our friendship allowed us to keep one foot in a simpler version of youth.

Caroline was the person I asked if discharge was normal and how to give a blow job. I told her my biggest fears: that I might be a virgin forever, or that I wasn’t pretty. One day she played me ‘Beautiful’ by Christina Aguilera all the way through. ‘This is what I think about you Tash,’ she told me. ‘I wish you could see it too.’ I didn’t believe her at the time, but I never forgot that feeling: the warmth of someone seeing the good in you when can’t quite see it yourself.

Inevitably, there were periods of distance: our university years, when we fell into new friendship romances; or our early twenties, when I spent a lot of time partying and taking drugs and she didn’t. Still, when shit hit the fan, I would call her and she would call me. Caroline put it best: ‘Of course there were times when you could feel the distance between us as we explored different paths. But I suppose neither of us felt resentful of that. It was our right as individuals, something celebrated and encouraged.’

In adulthood, though, distance becomes more emotional. When Caroline had her first baby I wasn’t really there for her. My knowledge of what new parents go through was minimal and I’m not sure I knew what to say or do. Then when she had her second daughter, I was struggling to conceive after a miscarriage and so didn’t do much better. Although she said all the right things and was sensitive to my feelings, I still found it painful to receive a photograph of her baby. Sometimes, whatever you say, the sadness or difference just sits there between you, and you know each other so well that you can’t pretend otherwise. But I don’t fear these gaps in our understanding of the other’s experience the way I used to, because love always barges its way in and returns us to each other. Now I see them as an inevitable part of trying to love anyone over a vast expanse of time. A small price to pay for someone who, when you’re annoyed at your parent, understands the decades of dynamics that led you to that feeling that no one else does. 

When I ask Caroline what she thinks about childhood friendship, she replies, ‘When we are together I feel like we are 17 again at your house, giggling about Sex and the City, dreaming of our futures’. Similarly, in Caroline I see the teenager focused on her colour-coded revision timetable, the twenty-something dancing to Simply The Best on her wedding day, the 31-year-old mother crying happy tears with a newborn baby on her chest, and the 38-year-old friend sitting in front of me just before Christmas, drinking a cocktail as we discuss our sex lives.

That feeling I have – the weight of 26 years of knowledge in another person and them seeing all those years back in me – it’s worth tolerating difference, and change, and distance, and all the awkward, clumsy ways we have and will annoy each other or say the wrong thing over the course of lives. I think in childhood friendship we have to give each other room to get it wrong. We have to allow ourselves to form separate lives so that we have space to miss the world we built together before we really knew ourselves. And then, when we return to each other, we get to linger in the joy of this very particular form of love, which existed before our job titles or achievements or partners or children, before our clearer skin and better clothes.

As Kamila Shamsie tells me below, ‘Your childhood friends are the people keeping alive that younger version of you. It can't exist in you alone.’ What a privilege, to keep the younger versions of the childhood friends we love alive; and what a gift, for them to do the same for us. For all these reasons, I wanted today’s interview to focus on childhood friends. I hope it reminds you to pick up the phone to yours, however different your lives are today.

Photo credit: Alex von Tunzelman

Why were you drawn to telling a story that put friendship love at the centre?

When my older sister and I were in our 20s, she said the friends we make as adults are our friends because we have something in common. But our childhood friends are our friends because they've always been our friends. At that point I had no way of knowing that statement would come to feel even more true the older we got. If I look at my childhood friends, our lives have taken different directions. But there is that bond, that glue, that comes from having someone who knew you as a child, who knows all the versions of you. They knew who you were at six, at 16, at 26. They also know how you fit in your family, and probably have relationships with your parents and siblings. There's a whole world that’s familiar without being family. I think I’ve always known the importance of those friendships. And as with any sort of romance that becomes a long-term relationship, you go through stages: the crazy romance of your teenage years, when you are everything to each other. That can't sustain itself, but something else comes along instead. I wanted to write about those different phases.

As well as showing the benefits of childhood friendships you also show the challenges. Like the difficulty in seeing who your friend is today rather than assuming they are still the version of them you knew when you were young. Is that a challenge you’ve found personally?

Yes. If you met someone when they were five, and now you're turning 50, you have to renew your idea of who they are. We're always making assumptions about other people. We think we know what's going on beneath the surface, possibly better than they do. Somewhere in this novel is the idea, how much can you ever truly, completely know someone, when someone is unlikely to completely, truly know themselves? I think two things happen in childhood friendships: one is that it's easy to revert into old patterns of behaviour. It brings out the teenager in you, which you’d otherwise put away and isn't there in your adult friendships. Being with childhood friends activates those old parts of you. That can make it seem as though you’re still that teenager, almost like a ghost that's reappearing in certain instances when you're together. But it is also true that we have to give people the opportunity to be affected by life. There are aspects of human character that stay constant. But people do change, and the degree to which their different characteristics get enhanced or subdued is a crucial thing. Because you can say, oh, you've always been a bit envious. But maybe over the years your friend has thought, I don't like being envious, I'm going to do everything I can to try and push that away. And so, it's still there, and as their childhood friend you can see the seed of it, but maybe it's now a more latent thing. Maybe there's a lot of work that has consciously been done against it.

Thinking about what your sister said, that with childhood friends you're not necessarily connected through interests or the values you have today. Do you think that’s why we need both childhood friends and adult friends we do share more current interests with? Or do similar interests become more irrelevant as you age? Because I remember being obsessed with meeting people who liked the same things I did when I was young,  but I don’t necessarily expect that from friends as much now. Plus our interests and values continuously change too.

One of the fascinating things about friends is that, unlike family, the numbers aren't already set. When you’re growing up you might have three first cousins and those are the only ones you’ll ever have. And in romantic love, for most people, there is one partner at a time. But friendship has this great capacity for many friends who fulfil different functions. And I think the happiest friendships – post adolescence – are those where you're not placing the entire demands of friendship on one person. There are childhood friends I call in specific moments, particularly if it’s anything to do with family, because they’ve always known my family and they understand the dynamics. But it's also important to me to have friends who are writers, because that’s so central to my life and who I am in the world. If I call up one of those friends and say, ‘I'm having a bad writing day,’ they know exactly what that means. Of course, your adult friendships can have enormous depth as well; they form their own histories. By now, there are adult friends who have been my friends for a quarter of a century. So I don't want to privilege the childhood friend in a way that completely outweighs the adult friendship. It is more about [acknowledging] there’s a particularity to it. You have to work at it, too, and the truth is you do grow apart from many childhood friends in ways that mean the friendship itself is just an echo of what was there once, rather than being a thing in itself.

In your novel you write about how in the 40s, childhood friendship becomes less about needing someone to call every day and more about being there when it matters. Is that something you feel about your older friends today?

Very much. You know that a huge stretch of time can go past, and you can still pick up the phone and that person will be there. Because you're so deeply in the habit of being each other's friends.

And yet some friendships can't withstand that transition from daily intimacy to more separate lives. In your friendships that have survived that change, has it been about having the same expectations at the same time, rather than one person holding onto the past version of the friendship? Or trusting that you both love each other, without needing the regular contact to prove that?

Friendships do go through a period where they have to accept a readjustment, and it's important that both people accept that. I was at the same school in Karachi between the age of four and 18. Most of my childhood friendships come from that period, when you saw each other every day, you knew the same people, you had the same schedule, you wanted to speak all the time and listen to the same music. There’s no separation with your closest friends in adolescence.

Then people go off to university and that first separation occurs. There is joy and romance when you make a new friend who doesn’t know [your] weaknesses or vulnerabilities, or how to tease you. A lot of people in those university years find that childhood friendships fade away, because they get so caught up in the excitement of the new friendships. You're also seeing yourself differently as an adult, and maybe wanting to walk away from your childhood self. Ultimately, you get to a point where you have to recognise your distinct, separate selves., which can be bumpy and painful.

Then there’s another moment of change, when friends start forming family units. That becomes another space that is theirs, which, however close you are, you're not intimately in in that same way. People disappear for a few years.

A number of my friends had [children] around the same time, and in that moment, there has to be recognition on both parts: I'm not as deeply invested in this particular world as you are. I suppose there are people who at that stage find those friendships move apart. But I do think the 40s become interesting again, because friends come out of that stage. It’s a period where you also realise you have less time for things that aren't important. You ask, is this what I want to spend my time on? Maybe that’s when you think, actually, these people who, in the last few years, I haven't been in touch with that much, isn't it amazing they're still around? And we can pick up those friendships again.

What are the qualities in those childhood friendships that now you realise are important that maybe you didn't when you were 21?

If someone has always been there when you really needed them, ’always’ isn't long when you're 21. And when I was [that age] it was all about forward momentum, rather than a looking back. It's about the next step, and the next step, rather than thinking, this is my life, I want to settle down into it.

I also think you get more comfortable with certain differences. When you are 19, you're filled with powerful feelings about how you see the world, what’s right and wrong. If anyone doesn't feel that way, it seems that there's a defect in their character, where you don't want to be around them, or you're going to yell at them.

In 2016, there was Brexit in the UK, Trump in America. Some people said, ‘I can no longer speak to this person because they're on a different side of the divide.’ But I think there's a lot to be said for not feeling you have to attack and draw attention to every point of difference. In my novel, by the end, the [two friends] can't avoid it. But for many years they say, we will live in that territory of our friendship that is love. And yes, there are crevices and abysses, but we're just not going to go there. There's a lot to be said for a considerate avoidance. Very often we have this idea that we must confront differences head on. But it can be an act of kindness to say, we fundamentally disagree so deeply, we're not going to convert each other, so why linger in the nasty areas? These spaces are uncomfortable and we could do genuine damage to our friendship in that particular territory. So let's get somewhere else. That became clear to me while writing the book.

Now there are many friends who don't see the world as I do. Obviously I think they're wrong and I'm right! But I also know their fundamental character, and I know the answer to the question, who could you call at three in the morning because you’re having a bad night and you want to hear a comforting voice? It's not just that they would answer the phone, but that you would feel okay about calling them.

As a new parent, one of the things I loved in your novel was the friendship between a woman who has kids and one who doesn’t. Did you want to show a way to sustain friendship through that experience?

When you are close, you allow a friendship to adjust. You [think], okay, we're not going to spend all Sunday in the pub garden. Instead, you go over to someone's house and hold the baby while they shower. That becomes a different space of intimacy, to see this old friend in a different role. There's also a privilege, to be close enough to someone in those sleep-deprived crazed, times of their lives, that they'll call you and say, ‘can you come and hold the baby?’

Also, some of my closest friends would call and say, ‘I just need a break from being someone's mother.’ Then you go out and talk about anything but children. There are different ways you can do it. It also depends on friends being aware that they want to maintain this friendship with you, and they shouldn't take it too much for granted, or expect that the only thing you're interested in is their three-month-old.

I like what you said about the 40s: the sleep-deprived newborn years pass, kids grow up, and it changes again. Maybe you get to return to Sunday afternoons in the pub garden!?

Yes. Also, there are now teenagers in my life who I'm incredibly fond of, who I've known since the day they were born because their parents were my friends. I've never wanted to be anyone's mother, but I like the idea of being the cool aunt. You don't have to deal with the stuff parents deal with, but you're in their life. They become these lovely human beings you've always known, and you get to watch them through different stages.

At one point, your two main characters send George Michael clips to each other as a way of reconciling, even though they still don’t agree. We’re often told intimacy is revealing and talking about everything to each other, but does intimacy sometimes come from not having to say everything? And with a childhood friend, can you reconcile through shared history?

The George Michael clips are a way of saying, there's a lot we don't agree on, but look, here's the stuff we've always agreed on. It’s a reminder of a time when you loved the same thing; a reminder that you understand each other and still see in the other person that 13-year-old who sang Careless Whisper like it was the most moving thing ever written. And that you’re friends above everything else.

Your childhood friends are the people keeping alive that younger version of you. It can't exist in you alone. I do wonder about people who don't have childhood friends, whether there's a different way in which they access who they were when they were 12 or 13 or 14. Because there needs to be someone from that stage of life, I think, who can send you something like a George Michael clip, or a picture taken on the last day of school, or something that evokes so much in terms of memory, and affection, and a shared history.

What does friendship bring to your life that other forms of love don't? Why should we treat it with reverence?

Because it could so easily not exist. Often you don't live together, you don't work together, you don't have other siblings or parents saying, ‘Make it okay’. You could easily walk away from each other's lives — and yet you stay. You stay through the hard times, or when you're annoying each other. And when there's no time for friendship, you make time for it, because you recognise how important it is to keep it going. But also, friendship is a love that can move into the backseat and say, Okay, now you need to go and do your familial thing or your work thing or whatever it is. And I don't need to see you today, or this week, or this month. Sometimes the quality of a friendship is that it will just stay there, waiting for the moment in your life when you can return to each other again.

It should also be said that there's nothing funnier than the joke you laughed at when you were 12, and you're still laughing at today.

What do you wish you'd known about friendship love?

I like processes of discovery, and you come to discoveries about love in the right time. I mean, yes, if at 18 when you first go to university you're suddenly no longer connected to your best friend the way you used to be, maybe you’d want to have known that it would be okay. On the other hand, I think you shouldn't know that then. You should live through the different bumps and periods and come to an understanding through having lived.

I suppose the one thing I'm glad I’ve always known is that I mean a lot to my closest friends. That is the crucial thing: that basic understanding that you are loved. Whatever differences and periods of separation there are, you never think, this person doesn't give a damn anymore. There's a great word in Urdu, ‘naz’, which is the pride that comes from knowing you’re loved. I think everyone should have some naz in them.

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie, published by Bloomsbury, is out now

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Things I love this week

*Stick the Landing

A podcast about the final episodes of TV shows. The first two episodes focus on two of my favourite TV shows: Mad Men and Friday Night Lights.

*A&W by Lana Del Ray

I didn’t give the album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd much of a chance last year, but now I love it, and I’ve been listening to this song on repeat both sides of my commute. It’s so fun to sing: "‘Your mum called / I told her / you’re fucking up big time / but I don’t care baby I’ve already lost my mind.”

*Workin’ moms

Recommended to me by Caroline! I love the way they write Anne and Kate’s friendship.

*This Seafood Spaghetti recipe

In Bre Graham’s brilliant substack Dishes to Delight. I also love what she says here: ‘So much shifts every day in our lives that is beyond our control, but how and what we cook and how and what we love is something that I cling to and want to capture for you here. Fight for delight in all you eat and with everyone you love.’

*Girls’ Night by Kate Baer

Here’s to telling the friends who remember that we love them this week.

With love,

Natasha

If you enjoy this newsletter, you might also enjoy my book Conversations on Love, which is out now in paperback.