It Looks Better On You: New Zealand Women Writers On Their Friendships

Reviewed by SHONAGH LINDSAY*

There is nothing dispassionate about women's friendships with each other if the 30 writers in this warm, memorable collection of narratives and poems are anything to go by.

Written as memoirs of their most significant relationships with the female other, what surprised me most about their friendships was how much they were like falling in love, in fact, more than once were described as just that. Male writers set the same task would be hard-pressed to come up with such a response, I kept thinking, as I read writers whose memories went back to the 60s, 70s and 80s alongside those of two young Malaysian literature undergraduates writing wistfully to each other, one ending her letters, "I love you, but then you know that".

The greatest number were of friendships formed in that hothouse period of early adolescence, arriving at the same time as sexual identity - which one thinks could explain much of their passion and intensity, except that even those formed later in life in their writers' early 20s and mid-30s have a similar rapture and intimacy, a sheer joy in each other's company.

What attracts you to a friend is, after all, not that different to what draws you to a lover, whose longevity will, in the end, depend on the best ingredients of a friendship: humour, fun, trust and constancy. And, of course, these are friendships plumbed with skill, sensitivity and wit by some of our best writers.

That discovery, or rediscovery, was matched by remembrances in the various writers' lives that matched my own. Joan Rosier-Jones' recollection of a friendship formed while she ran a guest-house as a single mother reminded me of how tough it was before the DPB arrived, along with the absolute necessity of female bonding to survive motherhood mentally intact.

Jenny Robin Jones' candid recounting of a friendship that became a triangle recalled the confusion and ambivalence accompanying the exhilaration of the sexual revolution. Other writers, such as Fiona Kidman and Elizabeth Smither, gave me insights into the value of friendships with fellow writers.

The best of these memoirs give a sharp flavour of their times. But all of them, simply by recording what Fleur Adcock describes as "far more permanent, thank God, than marriage", celebrate a relationship which few of us get through our lives without.

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.

- Edited by Jane Westaway and Tessa Copeland, Longacre, $34.95