They’re there when times are bad (with a dirty martini or a carton of B&J in hand) and they’re there when times are good (with a dirty martini or a carton of B&J in hand). They’re our sisters, our secret-keepers, our sage advisers. Read these odes to some of the world’s greatest friends, then pick up the phone and call yours.Jennifer Weiner with friend, Elizabeth
Author Jennifer Weiner, right, with her lovably “crazy” friend, Elizabeth
The kooky friend
My friend Elizabeth is the most kind-hearted person I know. She’s sharp and funny and fun to be with. She is also a total neurotic.
Her fears could fill a phone book: mice, bugs, elevators, confined spaces. She reads the fine print on warning labels and scrupulously adheres to the age guidelines for board games and amusement park rides. If she spies her daughter scratching her elbow, she’ll scrutinize the spot, murmuring, “Oh, I hope that’s not the bite of the brown recluse spider.” The last time we went swimming together, Elizabeth peered at the pond’s tranquil surface, then turned to me and asked, “Are there sharks in there?” It was a freshwater pond, I told her, so sharks would be unlikely. She looked at me somberly. “Things happen,” she said.
Elizabeth is, hands down, the most amusing of my friends. Not always on purpose, but she’s OK with that. Listening to her go through a menu (“That sounds good, but maybe it won’t be…I hope the pork isn’t undercooked…. Did anyone else read that article about the new pesticides they’re spraying on wheat?”) is like watching a piece of performance art. And, because of her occasional freak-outs, she meets new people in the most interesting ways, like the obliging kayaker who befriended her after she panicked in the middle of the pond when we went for that swim last summer. He towed her back to shore.
Sometimes I think that Elizabeth’s myriad terrors make the world a difficult place to live in…but then, I think, her world must be a more interesting place than the one most of us inhabit. After all, if you see every meal as a potential case of botulism, every hot tub as a roiling cesspool of infection and every rash as the harbinger of Dengue fever, imagine the sweet relief when the food’s OK, the hot tub’s clean and the rash is just a rash.
Besides, who wants normal friends? Normal friends do not have hilarious stories about the time they saw a mouse in their kitchen and barricaded themselves and their kids in the bedroom, and made their husband come home from work to kill it. Normal friends cannot fill you in on the five life-threatening strains of bacteria currently hiding in your chicken salad, or tell you why it’s not fair to say they’re afraid of flying, because really that fear is just an extension of the fear of tight, enclosed spaces.
And normal friends are not living, breathing embodiments of a most reassuring fact: Life won’t kill you (at least, not today). If Elizabeth can survive a world fraught with terror, with peril lurking around every corner and every bug bite an incipient tumor, then the rest of us can handle an overdue bill, an argument with a relative and pretty much anything that the world throws our way.
—Jennifer Weiner, author of the novels Good in Bed, In Her Shoes and the upcoming Certain Girls
Author Jennifer Weiner, right, with her lovably “crazy” friend, Elizabeth
The kooky friend
My friend Elizabeth is the most kind-hearted person I know. She’s sharp and funny and fun to be with. She is also a total neurotic.
Her fears could fill a phone book: mice, bugs, elevators, confined spaces. She reads the fine print on warning labels and scrupulously adheres to the age guidelines for board games and amusement park rides. If she spies her daughter scratching her elbow, she’ll scrutinize the spot, murmuring, “Oh, I hope that’s not the bite of the brown recluse spider.” The last time we went swimming together, Elizabeth peered at the pond’s tranquil surface, then turned to me and asked, “Are there sharks in there?” It was a freshwater pond, I told her, so sharks would be unlikely. She looked at me somberly. “Things happen,” she said.
Elizabeth is, hands down, the most amusing of my friends. Not always on purpose, but she’s OK with that. Listening to her go through a menu (“That sounds good, but maybe it won’t be…I hope the pork isn’t undercooked…. Did anyone else read that article about the new pesticides they’re spraying on wheat?”) is like watching a piece of performance art. And, because of her occasional freak-outs, she meets new people in the most interesting ways, like the obliging kayaker who befriended her after she panicked in the middle of the pond when we went for that swim last summer. He towed her back to shore.
Sometimes I think that Elizabeth’s myriad terrors make the world a difficult place to live in…but then, I think, her world must be a more interesting place than the one most of us inhabit. After all, if you see every meal as a potential case of botulism, every hot tub as a roiling cesspool of infection and every rash as the harbinger of Dengue fever, imagine the sweet relief when the food’s OK, the hot tub’s clean and the rash is just a rash.
Besides, who wants normal friends? Normal friends do not have hilarious stories about the time they saw a mouse in their kitchen and barricaded themselves and their kids in the bedroom, and made their husband come home from work to kill it. Normal friends cannot fill you in on the five life-threatening strains of bacteria currently hiding in your chicken salad, or tell you why it’s not fair to say they’re afraid of flying, because really that fear is just an extension of the fear of tight, enclosed spaces.
And normal friends are not living, breathing embodiments of a most reassuring fact: Life won’t kill you (at least, not today). If Elizabeth can survive a world fraught with terror, with peril lurking around every corner and every bug bite an incipient tumor, then the rest of us can handle an overdue bill, an argument with a relative and pretty much anything that the world throws our way.
—Jennifer Weiner, author of the novels Good in Bed, In Her Shoes and the upcoming Certain Girls
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