I believe in the possibility of fast friendships. When conditions are right, friendships can both develop quickly and hold “fast” over time. I explore the key role such relationships can play in my debut novel, The Art of Falling.
In a Goodreads review, reader Rachel said of the quirky grouping of characters in my novel: “This book reminds me of summer camp: in how it progresses from cloudy to an optimism that only skeptics could try to deny, and in the way Penelope develops quick friendships from her sad circumstance that help to break her cynicism.”
The summer camp comparison is spot on. Once removed from the pressures of our daily lives, we can simply “be,” allowing a whole new set of possibilities in our relationships.
Yet Penny is far from summer camp at the start of the novel. She is a dancer, in the hospital, and unable to move. Angela, her hospital roommate, is fighting the good fight against the cystic fibrosis that doctors predict will one day claim her. Penny soon learns from Marty Kandelbaum, the baker on the ground floor of Penny’s apartment building, that she landed on his car.
The circumstance of Penny’s fall and miraculous survival bring these characters together. For Penny, these will be her first friendships outside of the dance world.
“Outside of the dance world” is key. Penny’s body image issues, which have sadly come to define her, have no purchase in relationships with a baker and a woman who must calorie-load to meet her daily nutritional requirements. Who is Penny, beyond those issues? These new friendships allow her to find out.
I know how powerful such a change of setting can be. I started writing fiction to wrestle with questions and anger that lingered after my first husband’s suicide. He had threatened the act some six weeks earlier, requiring that I commit him involuntarily to a psych ward to try to get him the help he refused at every turn.
The man was 54 and had smoked filterless Pall Malls since high school—but was able to stop for four days, cold turkey, while in the psych ward. He was an alcoholic with a high tolerance for booze whose post-commitment attempts to stop drinking on his own resulted in vomiting and violent handshaking—but in the psych ward, he was able to suspend his intake without consequence. It was as if his psychology and biology were in suspended animation. (After witnessing this extraordinary phenomenon, I understood all too well why, often, a transition from in-patient rehab back to a real world scenario is a crash-and-burn prospect.)
Penelope is not an addict; she dukes it out with other demons. The hospital setting allows her to focus on her most elemental desire: to regain the motion she loves. For their own reasons, Angela and Kandelbaum invest in the result, and the fast friendships formed have a powerful influence on her recovery.
I host writing retreats for women in my summer home in northern New York State, and have watched fast friendships form over the course of a weekend as participants share their creativity, their dreams for their writing, good wine and food that they didn’t have to prepare, the renewal of the lake setting—and the fact that they are far from the pressures of their everyday world.
How about you—have you ever formed fast friendships?
[Ed. Kathryn Craft will send personalized, signed bookplates to anyone who requests one! Just email your name and snail mail address to: kathryn@kathryncraft.com.
