The friendships I keep up online feel safer. And yet my relationships with these intellectual (and emotional) women is much more complex, our communications forming a rhythm, months of silence when life gets too intense for us. We are all so sensitive, difficult. I wonder if this is like the friendship Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy had. Lifelong frenemies, redlipsticked and tightsweatered, highballs and cigarettes in hand. Sometimes it seems impossible to be real friends with other women writers, we are all such trainwrecks, messes, it seems, but sometimes it seems impossible to be real
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