More than the end of the calendar year, May has been the month when I’ve had major turnover in my life. It’s the month when Death, Sex & Money started (12 years young on May 4!). It’s when I packed up and left New York a few years after that. Years before that, my first marriage finally crumbled to pieces in May. Now, May is when my family gets packed up to migrate from Berkeley to Wyoming, where we spend summers for my husband’s work as a wildlife ecologist.
With each of these springtime page turns, my friendships have changed. When the show started, so much was great, but I also lost daily closeness with the reporters I’d worked shoulder to shoulder with in a newsroom. When I moved from New York, my go-to hangout friends became check-in text and audio note friends. When my first marriage ended, my friendships built around that partnership all got upended. When my family picks up and leaves the East Bay, our local friendships here go on temporary hold, and I turn my attention to restoking our friendships in the mountains.
Over the years, with all these transitions, I’ve felt many friendships I cherish grow weaker than I’d like. I learn after the fact about a job loss. A parent’s death. A big move. A medical diagnosis. I’ve seen how friendship is something you do, not something you have. You don’t just get to be a friend; you have to continually befriend.
So I was primed to appreciate my conversation with Andrew McCarthy about his new book, Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. (YES, that Andrew McCarthy. Of Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Mannequin, and Weekend at Bernie's.)
Andrew McCarthy is now 63 years old, an age at which he can see clearly how some early friendships directed the course of his life, and how, in later midlife, they needed attention. In our episode this week, he and I talk about the phase of life when sudden fame made him pull away and suspect the motives of people trying to befriend him. He also had some friendships weaken for reasons many of us experience: he stopped drinking, he got divorced, he raised kids, he got remarried, and he got older.
And one day his teenage son said to him: "You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”
The resulting crisis turned into a road trip, some long-delayed phone calls, and this new book. My favorite passages are about this old friend Seve, who struggles with chronic pain and has receded from a lot of life. He dodges Andrew’s efforts to reconnect, and then, Andrew shows up without an invitation. Repeatedly. Seve doesn’t always welcome the visits, but slowly, their friendship finds a rhythm again, and Andrew describes how they land back in the place where they can lovingly call each other out, in ways only old friends can:
Shame's ugly, it's like seaweed slimed all over you. And so when a friend kind of goes, "Let me take a strand off. It's cool. It's fine. It's just a strand. Let's get rid of that. Jesus Christ, that was all over you," you know? that's what friendship is, I guess.
We’ve got two cool live events coming up next month.
In New York, join us for a live Death, Sex & Money taping at the Tribeca Festival. Tickets to see me in conversation with artists and spouses Peter Dinklage and Erica Schmidt are available here.
And the next weekend, in Helmsville, Montana, I get to host a conversation in a very different setting at the Old Salt Festival, a really cool gathering that celebrates music, food, agriculture, and land stewardship, from June 19-21. Cole Mannix, big thinker and co-founder of the Old Salt Co-Op in Montana, is my guest. At a time when very rich Americans talk about leaving cities and states because of tax policy, Cole and I are going to talk about the tradeoffs and pressures of building a life and a business that you can’t move because it’s deeply connected to the land. Come out!
A cool, hopeful model for affordable housing for artists in the Bay Area, via KQED: “Artist Space Trust is the first organization in the nation to use a community land trust model to create permanently affordable housing specifically for artists.”
Wake up! Actor Ellen Burstyn has a new book where she curates her favorite poems, and it has a great name: Poetry Says It Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up. Long-time followers of my work may remember her reading me a Mary Oliver poem when I visited her at home for our first set of profile interviews in 2014. She has read me a poem at our show’s “funeral” in 2023 (before Death, Sex & Money was reborn at Slate), the same year she talked with me about rekindling inspiration after burnout and starting work on this book.
A woman filed a pregnancy discrimination case against her employer. She talked to her therapist via the platform Talkspace. And then….transcripts of her messages to her therapist showed up in court after the employer got a court order. Investigative reporter Annie Gilbertson on the enormous database of mental health info that Talkspace controls, in Proof News.
If you share some of my music tastes, you probably appreciate music from the Athens music scene of the 80s. Tommy Tomlinson wrote an oral history of that time and place for Garden & Gun, interviewing members of bands Drive-by Truckers, Widespread Panic, Pylon, and R.E.M., including a new interview with their former drummer Bill Berry, who left the band at the height of its commercial success. Hear about it here, and find it in newsstands until the whole piece is up online.
“The future is agrarian!” Watch Zach Galifinakis’ This is a Gardening Show on Netflix. What a fun, curious, principled, whackadoo show.
Until next week,
Anna
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