I wasn’t planning to write today, but the aerial lesson I had planned for the morning was cancelled, which was fine because I’m super sore from last night’s class and my thighs could probably use a break — although I don’t want to give them too much of a break because I’m rowing in my first race this coming weekend and between the terrible air last week and the long holiday weekend I haven’t been back on the water since camp and am fearful of losing all the gains of that four-day intensive.
Instead, I’ve spent the morning cleaning my office, looking for my lost Kindle (it turns out whoops it’s in Seattle), and — when not composing run-on sentences — reading Sally Jenkins’s remarkable profile of Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, and their career-spanning, cancer-surviving friendship, which ran in yesterday’s Washington Post. Actually I re-read it this morning, after reading it yesterday when it popped up in a gloriously detailed thread on Gina’s Facebook page about the competitive friendship between Lila and Lenu, the central characters in Elena Ferrante’s four Neopolitan Novels (about which Gina is currently writing a book for IG Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series).
I am sharing a gift link to the story here, for anyone who doesn’t have a WaPo subscription. It is a complex deep dive into the nuances of competition, ambition, and the lifelong bond that can develop between women who share a unique experience inaccessible to outsiders, whether that bond be cancer or international tennis superstardom. It is striking in its refusal to bend to standard mainstream narratives about women and competition. It presents Evert and Navratilova’s ambition and rivalry, and their relationship despite or because of said rivalry, not as something kooky to be gee-whizzed about, but as a plain fact of their extraordinary lives. It is unapologetic about letting their story and their intensity and their love for each other take up space and breathe on the page. I found it very moving.
At rowing camp, Robin and I found ourselves explaining to people who didn’t know us well that, yes, we were friends and that our friendship predated our cancer diagnoses by, at this point, 23 years. When I was diagnosed a few months after her, she was the second person I told, the Martina to my Chrissie, and over the past year we have reeled in both gratitude and disbelief that we have been lucky (?) enough to travel this road in tandem, our two-decades of shared experience shaping a new mutual understanding of illness, mortality, and perseverance.
“She and Me” was the title of the first issue of the feminist zine that Zoe, Anne, and I started back in 1995. To quote from that first issue’s editor’s note: “This inaugural issue focuses on the pleasures and pains, politics and personalities of woman on woman relationships. We set out to explore female bonds from bestgirlfriendship to romance to mutual loathing and contempt to whatever else struck our fancy.” But setting aside the cis 1990s language, I look at this project now with some awe, that in our 20s we were confident enough to proclaim this intellectual turf as worthy of our respect, and yours. (I, in particular back then, was hamstrung by my own ambition, struggling to free myself from a web of internalized misogyny that told me that anything I was good at, or interested in, was by definition worthless, because it was “girly.”) I wrote about Susie Bright and Camille Paglia as frenemies; Zoe detailed her passionate love for her best friend, Sari wrote about working at Playboy. None of it exists on the internet, but back then, already, we knew what was important.
Almost thirty years later, I am lucky enough to need more than two hands to count the intimate enduring friendships that hold up my life, even if I don’t some of them very often. This is going out to you; you know who you are! Read this article! It’s perhaps an odd choice for this day of fireworks and red-white-and-blue, but as the nation celebrates its founding fathers — in all their oppressive, colonialist, enslaving patriarchy — I was glad to find ourselves in some small piece reflected here.
Maxine! Oh yes