Transcript
Speaker: One reason friendship is so interesting is the fact that, unlike the other relationships that structure our lives, it doesn't really come with any kind of prepackaged shape. It doesn't have any particular narrative that accompanies it.
Speaker: To be a spouse or a child or a student or even a customer or employee is to find yourself inhabiting some kind of recognizable role. Obviously, none of those roles really capture the complexity with which we experience them, and it's probably the case that what's most interesting about any relationship is the sort of thing that happens when they fail to line up with those preconceptions.
Speaker: But the point is that those archetypes or those norms do exist, and that we all more or less recognize them. There's a way in which the nonspecificity of the concept of friendship places it somewhat outside of this framework.
Speaker: There's still so much we don't know about a relationship when we label it a friendship. There's a kind of utopian possibility that inheres in that open-ended quality. In every friendship, we have to work out on the fly what the roles are going to be, have to figure out what this particular friendship is all about, how it works, who we are within it.
Speaker: It could be that this project of figuring all of that out is, in the end, what friendship actually is. To be someone's friend is to take up that project along with them. Now, this improvisational aspect makes friendship a particularly rich problem for art and for narrative in particular.
Speaker: If it's true that friendship doesn't have a ready-made genre, then maybe we could say that each friendship requires a genre of its own. That means that it's always an open question. How do you tell the story of a friendship?
Speaker: What form should the story of this specific friendship take? Other kinds of relationships are really deeply interwoven into our very sense of what narrative is. It probably goes without saying that so much of our storytelling has focused on the project of romantic coupling, so much so that it can feel like the idea of story and of this particular kind of story are one and the same.
Speaker: The marriage plot is so centrally a feature of the tradition of the novel that novels that follow other plot lines can feel like exceptions. But even in the most conventional or normative kinds of couple stories, there's almost inevitably a host of other stories happening as well.
Speaker: Sometimes the real plot line is the friends we made along the way. Part of what I'm thinking about is the fact that friendship tends not to lend itself to stories driven by the same sense of narrative momentum, the sense that there is a particular telos, a direction in which things are bound to go.
Speaker: Friendship typically has a different rhythm. The obvious archetype for thinking about the narrative problem of friendship, it probably goes without saying, is the national broadcasting company's television program, Friends.
Speaker: Even though that show, as its title attests, is about friendship, it also feels like it can't really imagine a way to generate narrative without the lore of the permutational couplings of its characters, as if friends can't help but become friends with benefits.
Speaker: I could be wrong, but my sense is that no one really cares very much about this aspect of the show, despite it purportedly being central to its storylines. The allure of the program is clearly, I think, just the vicarious pleasure of hanging out by watching other people hanging out at a coffee shop, a pleasure that doesn't have a beginning, middle, or end.
Speaker: Indeed, a pleasure that is threatened by that kind of narrative drive. This tension is a constant in these kinds of hangout comedies, the primary draw of which is connected to a kind of utopian vision of goofing off with your friends in a coffee shop, in a bar, in a taxi station, in an office cubicle.
Speaker: The will-they-or-won't-they energy that supposedly anchors these stories ends up threatening to put an end to the open-ended, non-narrative pleasures of belonging, causing everyone to get snagged on the hang-ups that scuttle hanging out.
Speaker: Maybe I'm thinking along these lines because one of my guests this week is Sheila Liming, who literally wrote the book on hanging out. She's joined by her friend, Emer Feeney, who very clearly also has an advanced degree in this subject.
Speaker: And the two of them are going to talk about the 1987 novel Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Crossing the Safety is not a hangout novel exactly, but it is explicitly organized around the problem of how you might tell the story of your life if it were organized around friendship rather than some other more propulsive kind of plotline.
Speaker: The novel tells the story of the lifelong friendship of two couples, Larry and Sally, and Sid and Charity, who shape and determine the course of their lives together in ways that are rich, complex, and ambivalent.
Speaker: Halfway through the book, Larry, who is both the narrator and one corner of the novel's relational rhombus, more or less comes around to address the Ross and Rachel problem. Since this story is about a friendship, he writes, drama expects friendship to be overturned.
Speaker: Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome. Given the usual direction of contemporary fiction and the usual usual contemporary notions of human character, what more plausible than that Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat unmalleable wife, should be tempted by Sally's softer nature?
Speaker: The possibilities are diverse, he goes on. For friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to charity. There are other possibilities too. Sid with me.
Speaker: Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. Anything to get this equilibrium of two and two overturned. But Larry then insists that this novel will not be propelled by that sort of drama.
Speaker: It's interested in a different problem, namely how to tell a story in which an equilibrium actually holds. To be clear, this isn't to say that Crossing to Safety paints a utopian or idealized portrait of friendship.
Speaker: It's a story of frustrations, tragedies, and most profoundly, of disappointments. It's full of heartache and ambition and love, but one of the things it also tries to do is to draw a kind of artistic lesson from the complex ambiguities of friendship.
Speaker: What it means to find a life lived with other people meaningful is to figure out a shape or a form or a plot line that can hold it, to invent a genre that didn't exist before.
Speaker: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Emer Pond Feeney and Sheila Liming about making friends when you're old enough to know who you are, about the glimmer of Vermont, and about crossing to safety by Wallace Stegner.
Speaker: Well, um so we both live in the greater Burlington, Vermont area, and I moved here in 2020, but I believe we met first online, even though we live in the same city, effectively. um And I was living in Burlington at the time because I moved here in the thick of the COVID pandemic without a single friend, without a single relation, without anyone that I knew here, and spent basically the first year of my life in Burlington,
Speaker: not seeing anybody and not hanging out and not having any friends. um So I know that Emer and I, that our relationship started on the internet, but I could not tell you exactly when. I can tell you. Good. I can tell you. um So, you know, obviously the during the pandemic, um we were all doing different things differently. um And I was just, so you know, a little bit bored. i was working outside of the home. I work at my librarian, but I was bored at night, you know, just like anybody else. And um so I actually joined Twitter for the first time, the the website formerly known as Twitter. And um and I joined, um I friended a couple of people that I knew there, one being my friend Dan Shazen. And I noticed that, you know, as I was in, I didn't have that many friends. So the algorithm starts sort of feeding you the people that you know, the few people you know, but also then it starts to kind of feed you the people that they're connecting with.
Speaker: And, and, and this quirky woman kept saying things that I thought were really funny and kept saying, you know, talking about things I was interested in. And, and that was Sheila.
Speaker: And so I think we just started accidentally interacting in the threads, you know, the way you do. And then, um, I ended up inviting you because im I'm so weird that I'm always just sort of inviting people I don't know to do things. But um I ended up inviting you, Sheila, to join one of the sort of um casual women's camping times that I was doing in the – or I was helping support in the pandemic season. era for i had a lot of friends who were ah you know hanging out by themselves a lot and i saw I saw that and I was like how can we hang out together camping seemed like a way to go so I was doing these little hangouts and I ended up inviting you to one Sheila you couldn't make that one but but I would have history for the record I would have yes Yeah, and we do have a secret theory that we may have actually been in the same room at one point during the pandemic, too, but masked. Because Emer works at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, and during the pandemic, I was volunteering at the library. So there's a chance that we may have, like, been standing in a room together at some point and didn't even know it. Right. You might have been six feet apart. Right. Right. I could even have been telling her to do something. That's right. Yeah. yeah That's intense to, I've talked to many people who have had this experience of, of moving to a completely new place, um, right in the middle of the pandemic. Uh, and then, yeah, the strange, like, even though everything was online at that moment, um, to sort of having that, to be having that experience while, um, in a place that's totally alien to you. And it feels like the world is ending, must be kind of must be devastating in a way. And Vermont seems like such a lovely place, but I could also see it being a hard place to be completely isolated, um ah just sort of atmospherically or in terms of climate.
Speaker: Exactly. Yeah, it is a beautiful place. And Burlington is a really vibrant city. But at the time when I moved here, I was not able to experience a lot of that vibrance. You know, obviously, it was just for very, very practical reasons not available to me. So I spent a lot of the that first year of the pandemic, which I now refer to as the darkest year of my life. um I spent a lot of it walking around, like walking around by myself, like walking around Burlington and then also hiking. I spent a lot of time hiking because that was a thing I could do. And then when I ended up finally meeting Emer, I meet somebody who is also interested in walking around and hiking. So that's that's a good thing, too, because that ends up being something that we can do together then.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, we have so many overlapping interests. um But I was kind of struck by how weird it was to meet someone on online in that way. I hadn't actually, I meet a lot of friends online during the pandemic, weirdly enough. And I actually thought that was sort of the, I don't even think you can talk about the pandemic in terms of silver linings. But it was an interesting thing that that happened to a lot of people.
Speaker: I think is that those of us who are introverts by nature ended up attending things online that we wouldn't have attended in person because we're introverts by nature. And then we ended up meeting people who, you know, we have a lot in common with. um what What an interesting phenomenon that was. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And I know that the first time i was ever like really acquainted with Eamor, like the first time i ever saw her, we had been like texting, emailing, messaging, talking on the internet for a year and a half. And then the first time i ever actually saw her was she and myself and four other women rented Rudyard Kipling's house in Southern Vermont for five days. Yeah.
Speaker: For a women's writing retreat. And we'd never actually been together that we knew in the same room at that point in time. So that's when I actually met her was when we were renting Rudyard Kipling's house together. So when you were when you were preparing for the Kipling retreat, were you anxious that maybe ah this would go horribly wrong? Or were you pretty confident? oh Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I was fairly confident. and I was like, I think it's going to be fine, actually. And it was funny because by then I had met other people who knew Emer. And so I would like bring it up to them and they're like, oh yeah, you guys are going to be great. Like, don't worry about it.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. We were vetted a little bit, but but there were some other people there who, who we had, I think, looser acquaintance with. Um, and we all had a great time anyway. Rudyard Kipling's, the house, Nalaka is just phenomenal to stay in, um, And so it actually, in in many ways, it it it's segues with what we're talking about today, the book that we were talking about, the era that it was built in and this idea of like these camps that existed you know um that are so beautiful with their with their vintage vibes. um I don't know if that's a good segue into this. No, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker: ah That does sound good. So yeah, let's go ahead and talk about the work of art that you've chosen to discuss, which is crossing to safety. So tell me yeah a little bit about ah why that is your why that's your object of choice.
Speaker: Well, I chose this one, but to be fair, I was thinking about how many things Emer and I could discuss on this podcast. Honestly, I was like going through all these options. I'm like, we can talk about AS Byatt. We can talk about Laura Nero. We can talk about Steely Dan. We can talk about whatever. Like I had all these ideas. You can talk and talk talk and talk.
Speaker: But then I was like, wait a minute, but crossing to safety. and the reason that I finally, when I hit on it, was like, oh, this is perfect is one, of course, because this is a novel by Wallace Stegner that takes place in Vermont. And the second is because this is a novel that I have been trying to sort of like...
Speaker: force upon friends and relations for years. I love it so deeply. yeah And whenever I find a sympathetic soul who has not read it, I'm constantly like, here you go. here Here's a copy. Now go read it. um But when I met Emer and started talking to Emer and the first time we brought up Wallace Degner, it was like she already knew. She already got it. She'd already read it. I did not have to sell her on this book. She was already a convert.
Speaker: Yes. Absolutely. And also I think we have this, uh, uh, shared interest in the area that, that the, the novel takes place in this, you know, beautiful area around Greensboro. Um, and I have a little piece of land not far from there in Elmore. Um, and I just keep falling more in love with that area, but it's, it's kind of not like anywhere else in Vermont. It's it, there's this little shimmer around Greensboro area. um And so, yeah, it's it's that we have this book that so beautifully illuminates a time period and and ah and a friendship through, you know, time and space, but centered around that area. We're so lucky. I feel like it's just rereading this book over the last week and and and some change. I once again was struck by what an exceptional...
Speaker: um ah entree, you know, what an exceptional sort of gift it is um to us as people. you know Oh, that's, that's, I'm waxing. I'm waxing a little bit. No, that's good. it's it's It's, it's, excellent to live in a place that has a, has a glimmer to it.
Speaker: When you, Emer, have you been in Vermont a long time? Yes, actually, i was born I was born in Bennington, but weird but weirdly, because my mother's from Montpelier. So that's for folks who are might be listening. Bennington's at the very southern end of Vermont, and my parents only lived there for about a year. My father's from San Francisco, and they met, not like everybody, they met at UVM. Yeah.
Speaker: um and and my And then they ended up doing a couple of things, but then landing back in Vermont and quickly coming back up to the northern part of Vermont. But my mother's family is very much like the family that is that is described with less money, um but that is described the sort of old Vermont family um with you know very the old Yankee values um that are...
Speaker: you know, have changed a lot, but they're really, they're really sort of distilled and in this novel in a way that um we don't, you know, i I don't think I had articulated them as well until I read this novel. And I, and then I kept recognizing and recognizing and going, oh, that's my family. Oh gosh, that's what my family's like. Oh my gosh. You know, wow. That's why, that's why all the women in my family are like that. Okay.
Speaker: But so then, Sheila, when you were moving to Vermont, was ah was this novel kind of a part of your... Like, was this part of what made this ah move okay in your mind? Yeah, definitely. um I feel like Vermont was the place I was always intended to live. And I didn't figure it out until I got here.
Speaker: um But I grew up on the West Coast, and I actually fell in love first with Wallace Stegner when I was living in the Midwest. So when I was living in North Dakota and teaching at the University of North Dakota... Right when I moved out there, I read Wolf Willow, um his you know somewhat autobiographical novel about growing up in that part of the country close to the Canadian border during the Depression. And then after that, I read Big Rock Candy Mountain. And so I really kind of associated Stegner with that landscape. And I don't think I read Crossing to Safety until probably like maybe late 2010s, close to the time when I was getting ready to move here, although I didn't know I was moving here at the time.
Speaker: So um by the time I did get around to moving to Vermont, I was definitely thinking about it through Stegner's eyes and through the love that he has for Vermont, especially um when it's reflected through his living situation in the Midwest, because the novel starts out in Wisconsin and he's thinking about, you know, being in this kind of academic college town, but dreaming of and having his friends really sell him on this place that they talk up all the time in Vermont.
Speaker: I mean, there's it's speaking of Stegner, it's it's kind of a remarkable feat that he manages to be associated with so many different geographic regions or that he can be a writer who, um ah like often writers are considered, thought of as regional writers because they are so um ah closely welded to one particular region. But it seems like Stegner is able to like lay claim or um somehow,
Speaker: ah generate a kind of glimmer or tap into a kind of glimmer of like different parts of the country, which is, which is a pretty cool trick. I think it's, I think it's about how he can fall in love with places. He yeah had an immense capacity for that, I think, as well as for falling in love with people, but that, you know, um Yeah, I think that he really he really allowed himself to love places and to notice places and what made them special.
Speaker: He writes so intensely about places, but he doesn't write intensely about the same place. He's got this very um active outsider's gaze, no matter what place he's writing about. And I think that's partially what makes it so intense. So whether or not he's writing about California, like an angle of repose, or the upper Midwest, like in Wolf Willow and rock Big Rock Candy Mountain, or Vermont um in Crossing to Safety, he has this like intense perspective of, like, this is not my home, so I'm trying to learn it and figure it out and study it.
Speaker: Right, right. he has that i There was this phrase when in the beginning of the book where he he's describing... um being in Greensboro and like maybe it's the first time and how he could wash his hands in the, in the ferns. They're so, everything's so like wet and sopping and green and he's just, he's kind of just overwhelmed, but in it, you know, he just gives himself over to it. And I, and he does that in in all of his books to all of the places.
Speaker: What an amazing perspective. Yeah. And I think that might be, you know, what first caused me to kind of fall in love with him and his writing was that intensity of interest in these specific regions and these places, but also without this sense of like, and I belong to this place, but more a sense of like constant anthropological shifting and study. And I am going to bring up a quotation here because in my copy on page 36, I love this line. He says, what the disorderly crave above everything else's order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.
Speaker: And I remember the first time I read that as like an academic who spent a lot of my life kind of shifting around in different places. I felt like, yes, yes, I totally see that. so So can we unpack that? What's the difference between order and location? That's a good question. Well, he's talking about so much about lost people or people who are trying to find...
Speaker: Well, he he calls it order, but but trying to find, I think, belonging, trying to find um ah love in a world that has been hard, you know, and that and that order is part of that, you know.
Speaker: Yeah. Is what they're cleaving towards. um I don't, I think though, i in a way I almost pushed, but i I thought that was an amazing phrase too. It always stuck in my mind or that those, those lines around there. But I also, you know, and he does, he does this in the book as well. He, you know, he's really saying that like they longed to be loved and welcomed in and they had a very,
Speaker: a very rough, both of them had had very rough upbringings and and young lives where I think they always felt like outsiders or unloved. And so to to find that was just like, how would it how would that feel? You know, just fully lit up inside, you know, and they said they crowded in, right? They didn't just they didn't just take that bid. They got right in there, like starving puppies or something, you know? Yeah.
Speaker: Wow. Yeah, I see this line as drawn um sort of in contrast to the character Charity in the book. And Charity is cast as this, you know, I don't want to call her domineering, although she comes across some way sometimes like that, but she's more like this kind of... um Like New England matriarchal figure who's used to like doing all the organization on behalf of the family and pulling all the strings and putting everything together in order.
Speaker: So Charity's mindset is order. She's constantly trying to create order from the chaos and that is her compulsion. But here, you know, what he's saying is like those who do not have the luxury of having things already within their control, of having a sense of belonging that they're born into, long instead for a sense of finding themselves in a place that feels right to them or amidst a group of people that feels right to them.
Speaker: And there's a way that if you are that kind of person, then um a friendship with a person who's intent on creating order can actually be like profoundly um comforting in a way, even as it's also challenging to...
Speaker: another like Another line like that from early in the book that really stuck out to me is on page my page six. But the the sentence is there it was, there it is, the place where during the best times of our lives, friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
Speaker: ah Part of what seems really kind of fascinating about this book and that I want to think about in terms of friendship is it's really intent. It's almost like its narrative principle is location rather than narration, that it's more interested in trying to capture the experience of friendship.
Speaker: belonging which is not an uncomplicated experience than it is about like narrating some kind of story. There are multiple moments in the book where the narrator sort of comes back and says, you're probably expecting some kind of catastrophe to happen or something surprising to happen. um But that's not what this book is about.
Speaker: um And what it's about instead is this group of two sets of two married couples that have this lifelong friendship And it's not that the friendship is the friendship is free of stress or strife or complexity, but the novel isn't really interested in narrating any breaks or catastrophes. It's really more interested in thinking about what what shape would a novel be if it really were organized around that feeling of finding a place that you feel like is the headquarters of your happiness And staying there all your life and trying to make sense of what that means when it's all almost over.
Speaker: who And in fact, he even moves away in the narration. when when When there are catastrophes that are occurring, he kind of just dips out, you know? Like when when we see Sally, you know, get very ill when they're um when they're on their hiking trip together. And, you know... if you know the book, you know that that's ends up being where she's contracted polio and, and she's going to be crippled for the rest of her life from that. Um, but he, he, he basically, that's the end of that section. She gets sick and you see them scurrying to kind of leave and get her treatment, but you don't, we, then it picks up and, and it's already happened. All that hardship has happened. And even the hardship of, um, that, That Charity and Sid experience of Sid not getting his promotion, all that sort of like skipped over really quickly. And we're back to, you know, we're we're back to the in-between times and and that there's something special about this, the life in between the drama that is important.
Speaker: And maybe, you know, I think the suggestion is it's the thing that makes life what it is, not the like, you know, not the moments of, you momentous change. But these in-betweens at the end of the day, those are the things that are like maybe that have the most heft.
Speaker: Yeah. Though he doesn't shy away from it at the end, too. I mean, in a way he does, and then he doesn't, too, at the same time. um he's He really just is a master of figuring out where to where to withhold and where to go in.
Speaker: you know, in and and detail things within the friendship. um i I love rereading the book because i'm always I'm always struck by new things that I don't, and I think it's that, in it's a very, it's ah it allows for a lot of interaction of the reader, depending on where they're at in life and, you know, what they're going to focus on. um I think I was very focused on their meeting of each other,
Speaker: in my early reads of the book because that was the glow, right? That's the fall in love with your friend glow. And it's the the glow that I also liken it to is, or other books where I think have have done an amazing job of of showing that glow is On the Road, Jack Kerouac's book, when they're all meeting and it's just that like exciting falling in love moment that happens when you're young, you know, where you meet people who who resonate with you so profoundly. And I think there's always a little part of us that thinks, I'll never meet those. You don't even know you're going to meet those people until you meet them. And then and then it hits very hard because because there's a part of you that didn't know that was going to happen and hoped, but like a child part of you is so delighted to fall in love with people. who who are like you or see you, you know something like that. And that and and when you find those that in books, it's like, you know it's just so exciting. And um and and now that I'm older,
Speaker: I find the illness and the disability and the hard the hard things are what are compelling me more. And how do how do they manage to come back and to have the second chances that they that he talks about? Like we have a second lease. We have now another time to meet each other, another way to engage with the world together.
Speaker: I'm actually not sure that I can think of a lot of other books that are portraits of a friendship over such an extended period in which like all of the different periods of a lifetime of friendship sort of have equal weight.
Speaker: A lot of people are good at capturing that, like those sort of limerence stage of like finding your people, But then to have that, and then also I really love the way you describe it. It's, you know, a kind of a portrait of how you're constantly, in the best cases, you're constantly re-meeting your friends over and over again throughout your life as you change and they change.
Speaker: And there's something really powerful about a book that can document that without needing to, like, I don't know, without needing to make it something other than what it is.
Speaker: Agreed. This book is obviously about friendship, but in the moments when it's not about friendship, it's also about profound personal disappointment. um It's about the way we age through the experience of disappointment and how that tests our character. and it's like the friendship becomes this kind of through line that allows them to weather these disappointments and these setbacks and they keep coming back to it. So like Eimer was saying, Stegner is very crafty in the way that he hides a lot of the conflict and the disappointment that, you know, in other novels would be the main point. It would be the kind of centerpiece of what's going on there. But he kind of brushes it aside and instead he focuses on the friendship and how it, you know, continually brings people sort of back to a center in it.
Speaker: That's really helpful. Yeah. That, that, you know, one of the things that the friendship in the book does is provide, I mean, it provides a location and it's the location that enables the exploration of, you know, loss and disappointment in ways that otherwise might be like completely capsizing.
Speaker: um ah But instead they provide like a structure where the characters and the reader can sort of live with these experiences of of disappointment. it's also interesting to think about disappointment as a structuring, a narrative device, right? And not disappointments that are obliterative, not disappointments that destroy you. But like, how do you write a novel about wanting to become a novelist, a great novelist, and like only becoming an okay novelist? Right. Which is like, you know, ah the story of, you know, best case scenario, the story of most of our lives that you could aspire to such a thing.
Speaker: But again, it goes back to the like the difficulty, I think, of capturing both the bloom of youth and then the the sort of longue durée without yeah um one of those moments overshadowing the other. So it's ah yeah both a book about the excitement of having ambitions and dreams and meeting people who like help you figure out what those are. And then also a book about you know coming to terms with a life that didn't turn out the way that you thought it would, but that nonetheless was you know beautiful and moving at the same time.
Speaker: Yeah. The first third of the book, um the sections at least that take place in Wisconsin, there's so much about possibility and opportunity and aspiration and dreaming of the future and trying to put the pieces in place so that you'll get closer to the future that you want. And by the time the characters sort of realize that some parts of that future are no longer on the menu for them, there's this sense that, oh, we didn't realize that that was the moment. That was the moment of how good it was, right? When we were young and we were poor and we were still able to aspire and dream. That was the good stuff.
Speaker: then
Speaker: Yeah, there's sort of that possibilitarianist mentality of youth that, you know, is is really deep in their friendship. But I also think that that, you know, you've got the two engines there. You've got the engine of um of Larry, who is very energetic, very ambitious.
Speaker: he He details at length through different times how how hard he is working all the time. And Sally's amazing support of him. um You know, she's she's the the homemaker who is making that all possible so that he can just write and focus on that.
Speaker: And then in Charity and Sid's relationship, you know, Charity's obviously the engine. It's not working there, though. She's the engine that's like, you know, pushing, pushing and pushing. And yet that also is the dynamic that is holding them together. So it's so interesting because it's this, it's this you know, um ah very, very intricate relationship.
Speaker: web of people's energies moving together, and yet it is working. um i mean, possibly if Sid had actually been more ambitious, it wouldn't have worked like this. It wouldn't have glued them together because something about what people's people's flaws are what also connect them together and glue them together. um And so I mean, Larry also very obviously...
Speaker: and at numerous times is grateful for, he he acknowledges that charity is the engine that moved his career along at various points as well. Um, specifically at that moment where he didn't, he, he didn't,
Speaker: get the job. He didn't get to keep the job you know at Madison and suddenly they had nothing and then Sally was sick and it just like everything's sort of falling apart in their lives. And it's Charity's connections that make it work. it's It's their home and what they're able to give that makes it makes them get through that time.
Speaker: What strikes me the most though about the book, I realize, I'm sorry, I'm talking a lot. um But I realized it's this generosity that Stegner has to the vision of them all together.
Speaker: that he he's So many folk people, I think the narrative of our lives is our marriage, right? that the Or the primary relationship we have with some other person in our lives. Or the heartbreak that we have with that primary person. And he's so generous in his perspective that he he sees the full mythology of their lives together.
Speaker: together You know, and that that's a greater narrative. That's a greater story than just the narrative of his marriage. Like, it's, it's, I mean, it's such a deep view. It's, he's able to see that I think it's a really big perspective that most of us never see our lives.
Speaker: that way I agree. And it's antithetical to the way that we believe novels are usually told and organized and structured too, right? We're not just focusing on one hero and looking at how the hero develops and what kind of challenges come their way and then all the ancillary characters that help them to get where they need to go or else prevent them from getting where they need to go. But as I was rereading at this time, I was also struck by that same feeling of generosity, that there is this...
Speaker: immense emotional openness. And he acknowledges that he first learns it from Sid and Charity when he meets them. And then Larry himself ends up emulating and embodying that same spirit of generosity, showing the extent to which he is changed by his relationship with them. um And I love that the novel grows increasingly open like that as it um goes along so that you can see how he's been changed by it.
Speaker: I feel that it's sort of an intense book, Sheila, for you to insist that everybody read. know. It's a book that's asking a lot of your friends um in its portrait of of of friendship.
Speaker: This is not a book to give you know casual acquaintances or ah Facebook friends. I know. I know. And I realized that it may have put some of my relationships in jeopardy, actually, too, my insisting on it. About a year and a half ago, I was in Kansas City and I was ah visiting a colleague of mine and giving a talk on his campus. And I was in his campus office like right before my talk. And I i saw Crossing to Safety on his shelf. I was like, oh, my God.
Speaker: OK, you have Crossing to Safety. You get it. and he was like, oh, no, I haven't read it yet. I was like, well, you have to read it, like read it when I'm gone. and he was like, okay, okay. And then like a week later, he sent me a text message that like, you know, showed that he had started reading it with like a photo of the book. And then he never brought it up afterwards. So I have a feeling like he just abandoned it or couldn't get through it. And now it is like, you know, this elephant in the room in our relationship. Let me tell you. we Yeah. Whoever this is, you need to make this right. I know.
Speaker: Well, it could be that the book itself functions like like the friendship that invites you in. you know If you want that belonging, if you if that is something you've been looking for, that warmth, that that welcoming into the space, you know um then I think it's it's your book. But maybe some people don't need that. That's not what they're looking for. Well, some people need order and some people need location. so Exactly. You know, it's so funny. i I also was really struck by in this read, I was like,
Speaker: boy stener's really focused on how bossy charity is Like, he's really – he kind of, like, derides it a bit and and and doesn't always – like, on the one hand, there's moments where you see that he does respect it, that he sees that it is a thing. But he also is kind of like, whoa, you know, pull back, lady, a lot of the time. And I i also couldn't help but wonder with this read was, you know, is this – Is he also sort of coping with the changing, you know, well, first of all, the culture that she comes from is fairly different from the, you know, the the womanhood culture that he has grown up with, which is a more um subservient um and and humble, less confident version of of womanhood.
Speaker: But also, I think women were changing, you know, and and there was these new versions of what women could be and what women, you know, could dream of. And he's kind of, I think he's grappling with that a little bit throughout the book. um you know There's that scene where he imagines Sid Lang's first interaction with Charity's family. And he was not there, right? He owns up to this. He's like, a lot of my stories about these people are secondhand because I didn't know them when they were at this age. So instead, he imagines when s Sid Lang, as a graduate student at Harvard, drives to rural Vermont to show up at Charity's family's summer compound. And it's like a downpour in the rain, and he gets out of the car, and he doesn't have the right shoes, and he's immediately soaking wet, and like clearly has no sort of like lay of the land, you know? And then shows up on um Aunt Emily's porch and Aunt Emily like basically makes him sit there. He describes this feeling like he's like, you know, waiting in kindergarten for something, you know like just totally kind of put in his place um and then kind of witnesses this swirl of this.
Speaker: Female-led, quasi-matriarchal family. um And all their strong figures within it. And Charity is one of them. And that's where he starts to see her as part of that, I think, organization and structure. This is, of course, Larry or Stegner imagining this whole thing happening because he doesn't see it firsthand. So he's creating the background for Charity and Sid's characters in that moment. But I find it so fascinating that he's immediately casting Sid into this kind of like beta position and then having him show up and like witness everything that's going on with Charity in her world.
Speaker: And I have to say, though, I mean, yes, he is imagining that, which it's, you know, it's auto fiction. But he's not wrong either. But I also think that his interpretation of it is very much an outsider's interpretation. You know, being being of of old Vermont stock, that is what women – women are quite strong here. um the The culture for women has been that we are – we do. We do. to do.
Speaker: we have to do but and i and also like Charity is just kind of like a super wasp. you know she's she's She's very highly organized. She's doing the list in the morning. um Just like Alexandra Stoddard, just like Martha Stewart, right? these are those are Those are all tropes that we're we are familiar with now. And he was meeting it kind of out of the blue, I think. And like, what is this? hyper organ And I think his fascination with her, which sometimes does manifest as repulsion in the book, um the way Larry like looks at Charity, is that he is just fascinated by something that is so anathema to his own upbringing.
Speaker: um if you like you know If you read some of the other Stegner books where he is more frank about his own childhood and his own upbringing, there's a lot of incredibly domineering male figures in that. In Big Rock Candy Mountain, the whole family is basically put through...
Speaker: I don't know, that book's really long, like 600 pages of torture by his dad who keeps moving them around in search of better jobs. But in the meantime, it's just kind of awful to the whole family in the process.
Speaker: So I think it's partially this fascination that there can be another way, that there can be an alternative way of arranging family relations and that it can kind of work um despite being so different from what he knew.
Speaker: Yeah. But he does, i mean, he he is he he does seem fairly uncomfortable with it at times. That's why he has to rag on charity about the tea when they go on the hiking trip, right? Right, right. The damn tea. Yeah.
Speaker: and he And he sort of – I think he sees the men who are bossed around. He he does have less respect for that aspect of things. um Is it Barney?
Speaker: Barney is the is the you know older academic guy who sort of you know shuffles off to his think house. Yeah. ah um on Emily's husband. and And he just kind of is this side character who who she's bosses and and gets rid of and puts out of sight regularly and manages, you know. um And he doesn't seem to have a lot of respect for that, though, you know. Well, there's also a way in which this is ah on some level a story about not being an academic, which is, you know, like a ah like ah a kind of escape that he makes that he's clearly, um you know, happy to have to have made. So that's a part of the ah portrait of these Barney figures too, I think. There's that conversation early on when he's talking to one of his colleagues in the department, or maybe it's his chair, and the guy mentions one of the other colleagues in the department and says, oh, poor guy, he only has his salary, right? and And everybody feels bad for him because basically being like, oh, he has to make a living from being an academic.
Speaker: You know, most academics don't do it that way. And then the Larry character feels suddenly like on the outs, um clearly understanding like where these divisions lie, even within his own milieu. Yeah, there's some interesting ah explorations of different of of class and privilege in the book that are... that are um I think what's remarkable is that Charity and Sid, who are both... ah you know Charity is like culturally wealthy, culturally privileged... Sid turns out to be secretly really wealthy, which I think is one of the most interesting turns in the book, you know? um but But the way that they they take on um Larry and Sally, and it's not...
Speaker: um what is the word I'm looking for? They're they're not um patronizing about it. Like they're not doing it because they want to make themselves look good. They genuinely connect with them and then feel that it is their, you know, they're they're capable of helping them and that it is their duty almost to help them because they love them. And that's that's not necessarily something you see a lot.
Speaker: portrayed that the the you know wealthy couples do, um that they cross the class line there and really and really invest themselves in another couple's lives.
Speaker: That's pretty extraordinary. think so, too, yeah. It is interesting that it's about the friendship of two couples, which like, you know, complicates the the geometry that there are, um you know, I think lots of notable depictions of of friendship in novels, but there's something kind of special about um ah this particular ah depiction of two couples who are friends in a way that resists the need to make that rhombus relationship
Speaker: primarily a question of like some sexual, i was going to say triangulation, quadrilation or whatever, um ah you know, so that there's ah there's something really powerful about the book's like insistence on resisting being primarily about two couples that then have to like negotiate these sexual rivalries or something. And instead it's like really wants to insist that there's something else going on ah that's holding these people together.
Speaker: Yeah. I don't know if you guys have the version that comes with the introduction by Terry Tempest Williams, but I cannot resist anything that has Terry Tempest Williams name on it. So I obviously read that introduction. And this is sort of what she says as well in her introduction, which is like in the hands of a weaker writer, this would be a novel about competition and it would be a novel about sex. Yeah. And it would be about the kind of cross-pollination between the characters in terms of like what they're attracted to, which is this sense of extremes in ah in each other. But then also it would be much more about Sid and Larry competing for similar kinds of things and trying to distinguish themselves in their career. And it's really not. um it It does a good job of of staying away from that. There are moments when that tension is there and you can tell that the characters probably are supposed to feel it or are feeling it on some level, but it is not the main point of the drama.
Speaker: I mean, I could use a lot more books that ah that that focus on on on these on friendship relationships ah as being central to our lives because I think that is the truth. And and while we have these like you know high, dramatic, romantic moments, specifically when we're young and probably intermittently throughout throughout our lives, that we think are end-all, be-all,
Speaker: the end all be all When you look back on your life, you go, oh, it's the friendships. i really And even with your – sometimes if you had a significant other for a long period, you realize that at the core of it, there's there's a friendship.
Speaker: And so it's like to allow us to have this this book focus on just the amakitia, amakitia version of love, i want more of that. I want more of that because I think it's the truth.
Speaker: I think it's the truth about about what sustains us in our lives. And it's you know it's not even surprising. We've got this super focus on on the nuclear family, and that is, that is the I guess, the capitalist you know model of family. and And that's just, it's not true. It's not a true ah reflection of of what sustains us and takes care of us throughout our lives and what we really end up giving ourselves to.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think part of what the book ah is about, too, is about the extent to which just the history of the novel generically, like it sort of stacks the deck against being able to represent those kinds of friendships or to tell the story. Like, it's just a really interesting question. How do you tell the story of friendship, which, you know, the novel is very good at telling the story of marriage and ah and its aftermath? um or marriage and its dissolution. But to narrate a friendship, specifically a friendship that stays around for your entire life, um you know, obviously it's a psychological problem how to represent that. But it's also specifically a narrative problem because it really is not what the novel has typically been set up to to try to um sort of document
Speaker: And so it's a really remarkable, like formally, I think it's really remarkable to to figure out a way to to tell a story about um the thing that stays around for the, you know, about the the place, the location, not just literally, but also the way that a friendship can be the ground that makes everything else possible and stays that way, even as it changes for decades and decades. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. The climactic scene of the novel, as I see it, is that scene where Larry and Sid are hiking alone when they're on their overnight kind of, you know, donkey hiking trip. And when they go off and they discover that most perfect canyon, right? They go off trail and they hike over some hills and then they find this perfect bowl of a waterfall coming down. And Emer and I have a project to eventually discover this spot. We're working on We're going find They're going to find it because it's got to be there. And it's it's so lovingly described, but there's also this real um sublime energy in that scene of the two men for each other that nearly feels like it's close to boiling over into something that could be like homoeroticism, but it doesn't. And they're just incredibly generous towards each other. And they're incredibly grateful to be there in that moment with each other. so it's this celebration of friendship and their relationship. And then of course the come down from that when they get back to camp and they see that Sally is ill and they realize their lives are going to be completely changed by whatever's coming next. right. Yeah.
Speaker: the Yeah, the contrast is like, is yeah stunning. But I think you're right that the heart of the novel is is in the paradise. And he uses that word repeatedly. He repeatedly, and he's always referencing Eden. eden um Though he is, I think, a little bit high-handed to to characterize Charity's personality as being the snake in the garden. Okay, that's a lot. But um but he he does, I think, you know,
Speaker: the The fact that he's saying they are in Eden together, you know, that's is so big. And then that moment where that when there's... It's like they're in they're in child mind together. They're in the beginning place, you know. And they're playing with each other like they're boys now that they're long past the age of boyhood, right? They met each other as adults. They didn't have that period of their life together, but they're acting like children and they're cavorting like children. And then the moment they come down from the mountainside, they are brought very harshly into the realities of adulthood again.
Speaker: But I think the real counterpoint, Sheila, and i think I think you would probably feel this too, is the end of the novel is the bookend to that. The end of the novel where where Larry is searching and searching for Sid for hours in the woods, right? It's the same feeling. he's and He's looking for him. He's looking for him. He's looking for him. And then they see each other in the darkness, essentially, right?
Speaker: Yeah. And it's, it's kind of breathtaking that moment, but it's, it feels cause it feels like, like deep mythology. yeah Yes. Yeah. You're, it's like you're, they're going together into the darkness, into the place they don't know, you know? um And it, it feels very mature, like it, in the sense of, of the the maturation of, of realizing you're not going to understand.
Speaker: You're not going to, there's not going to be a resolution. Yeah. It's, there's going to be a series of, you know, losses as in losses in the darkness, as you go closer and closer to the, to the unknown, you know? And, and that is just like, ah it just, it hits you like a ton bricks. I, I, I had sort of, I think the last time I read this book, I didn't read it all the way to the end. I stayed in the happy glowy stuff. Yeah.
Speaker: more And I just, for whatever reason, didn't finish it. It's like when you when you watch rewatch a favorite TV show and you don't go all the way to the end. Right. Because you know what's going to happen. You know what's going to happen. But but actually you don't. You forget that how it how it concludes. And this you know this this story concludes in such a profound way, handled handled so expertly that that it it hits very deeply within you, I think. um To anyone who hasn't read it, you know, boy.
Speaker: You're in for something. um But I also feel like it's, you know, I was going to say, like, we should continue to try to ask people to read the book because if they don't want to read it, they may not be a lifelong friend for us because we have a high bar. We want people who who want to dive, who want to go into that Glen and yes and and be, you know, very deep in relationship.
Speaker: And not everybody maybe wants that. But I think Sheila and I do. We hate each other so much as we're like, not ashamed that we really want to have deep friendships. And we really want, you know, to, to experience.
Speaker: humans deeply um This is a goofy thing about my relationship with Emer, but that sort of reflects some of the themes we've been discussing in the book. But like, Emer and I both love spending time outside. We love camping. We love hiking. We have working schedules that do not always sync up with each other. So we like try to do these things together and they don't always work out.
Speaker: But something that's happened recently is I've been on a number of hikes or camping trips that were ones that Emer recommended to me, or we tried to do it together and we couldn't do it together. So I went by myself and then I saw the whole hike through Emer's eyes, like while I was doing it. Right. Because like she prepared me for me and told me about it. And then I go and I do it by myself, but it's like she's there and I'm looking at it through her perspective.
Speaker: Oh, that makes feel so nice. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. And also I would say too that, um you know, this book is about people who met when they were young. But I would say there's this amazing thing that can happen when you're older when you meet people too. And maybe maybe it doesn't happen as often. um But when you get to meet people as you're coming into the the ah maybe more genuine part of your life where you've you've gotten past faking things as much and you are you're being more of who you are. And so when you when you become friends with people, then there's a purity to that, I think, as well. Because they're really you you don't just want to hang out with anybody. at that point. you You want to hang out with someone who's like... Right. The darkness is coming. We need... Yeah.
Speaker: Time is precious. Time is precious. Right. And I do... I also... We also love Anne of Green Gables. This is a sidebar. But we also love Anne of Green Gables. And there's an incredible friendship in Anne of Green Gables that that I have always kind of had in my mind between Anne and her friend. um who are bosom buddies. Bosom buddies.
Speaker: Yeah. I always had that in my life. Kindred spirits. Yeah. Kindred spirits, you know, that that's, that is a special and sweet and wonderful thing. And why should we settle for less with our dearest friendships, you know? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It's true. I mean, being friends when you're like being friends with someone when you're 14 and you're changing every day, your opinions, your tastes, your clothing, your style, you know, um what you adhere to is different from being friends with somebody when you're in your forties and you know who you are. Right. And you know what you want.
Speaker: I mean, I, I only have a handful of friends from when I was younger. i love them with a very, you know, a special kind of love. Um, And and but then i but then when I met the people who really – I met some people in my early – my late teens and um who really kind of so you know were the people I was looking for, I guess. you know and And the way that those hit home –
Speaker: those those are those Those people see have seen you through so many changes. And so, you know, they they love you. They love all of you. And you know they love all of you. They're not picking they're not picking and choosing just the good parts. They've seen, you know, the whole spread. and what ah what you so you feel so held by them.
Speaker: um, in a way. Yeah, that's right. And then, but then when you're, when you're older and you're making friends, you have to, you have to quick hurry up and like confess, you know, you have to read this novel. Here's the deal. Um, and, and, you know, that's wonderful too. I'm so excited to keep making friends because I feel like, um,
Speaker: I feel like I didn't, I didn't know who I was. Yeah. Like you're saying, Sheila, like I didn't know what I was looking for. So I couldn't, I couldn't recognize it always when I, when it was there, you know.
Speaker: Yeah. I should also say that, um, that Emer is a wonderful matchmaker of friends too. Um, Emer and I are in a writing group together, which is largely something that she devised, or at least she like roped me into it a couple years ago. And, um, our writing group is wonderful. It has done so much for me and it's done so much for my confidence in thinking about the projects that I want to work on. um and so like Emer provided that introduction to this other network of friends too, that has been like really helpful to me. So.
Speaker: Oh, thank you. I think, and what's interesting about that, talking about friendship, is the other people in the group, I've known them a long, long, long time. Yeah, you guys have have deep history, yeah. we We have deep history, but more superficial. And now now our our relationships, our friendships have deepened through this sharing of our writing.
Speaker: um So I guess I would say to people who are... It's kind of like dating, right? Go towards the things this that you're really interested in and you will have friendships that deepen.
Speaker: um you know i don't Don't sort of like just go and expect to meet someone at a bar or at a party. It's really about going towards the things that are your passions and then you're going to meet you know amazing people that share your passions that you you know, and probably will share other passions of yours besides that one that connected you. Speaking of passions, is that your cat or is that Brian's cat? That is one of the cats.
Speaker: but
Speaker: Passion for cats. is it Is it an old cat? He's a yowler. He's a Siamese and they are very talkative. Yeah. Love the cat. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you both. This has been just so lovely. And I had not read this novel before and am so grateful, if nothing else, that that I had the opportunity to to do so because it really is a remarkable book. It feels like a like a book for adults in a way ah that like a lot of books really, you know, don't feel that way.
Speaker: um It just really feels like a book that has a sense of of what life is really like across ah the whole span. oh So, Brian, are you going to come up to Vermont and help us recreate the um the trek? Yeah. this Are you ready? i think I think I want you to do some recon first. If you can if you can narrow it down, ah then we know we have we have parts, right? We have mapped parts of it. We just don't know exactly. There's the Bailey Hazen Road as part of it. Right. We know the Bailey Hazen's there. know where Folsom Hill is. like All right. I take it back. Actually, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm very confident that in your ability to make this happen. So, yeah, I definitely will be there.
