When, during the knotty course of romantic entanglements, your friends break up with their significant others, you are left to make a decision: Do I stay in contact with this person that I only know through my friend, or do I cut ties with this person and thereby reaffirm my primary friendship via the severing any connections, no matter how superficial? I have people in my life that have stayed “Facebook Friends” with some of my exes, and while it’s a bit bizarre to think about at first (“How dare you not expunge ______ as I have expunged her?”), it’s a good reminder that my failures in specific and my reality in general are not always automatically shared, regardless of the depth and duration of the aforementioned friendship. I shouldn’t expect reality to be excised so neatly, as it’s lived so messily.
I was thinking about these things – more eloquently than I can capture with words, of course – as I read through Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, a delightful new book by Annie Spence. For many years, Annie Spence was Annie Authier, girlfriend to my friend Brian Siers. Annie was funny and smart and easy to like, so I enjoyed talking to her about pop culture and crafts and books and work, and since she was kind, she evinced no great discomfort talking to an old obnoxious dude about such things as well. While Brian and Annie were together for many years, it was clear after a point that their lives were going in different directions, and they broke up. In the aftermath, being Brian’s friend for quite some time, I went for a scorched earth policy of deleting Annie from social media and not communicating with her, not that we ever wrote messages via raven on the regular. And while I felt sad doing it, I felt like I was upholding some tacit agreement on the sacrifices of friendship, as sophomoric as that seems now.
Now Annie Authier the “maybe I want to write children’s books” person is Annie Spence the “I wrote an honest-to-dog fucking book” person, with an agent and personal appearances in bookstores and such. Reading her wonderful tome was like sitting with her on a slightly-too-low-to-the-ground couch on a too-warm Chicago afternoon, listening to an inventive and creative person spin wonderful scenarios of whimsy and longing and wit, feeling the energy and passion of someone who had doors to new realities opened by the power of reading. Being from similar backgrounds of uniquely northern lower Michigan semi-poverty, I always had an ear for Annie in ways that I didn’t with Brian’s other girlfriends to that point. I didn’t realize how much I missed that voice until I read Annie’s book, and it’s a nice feeling to know that, should I ever miss it again, all I have to do is open a random page, read a passage in a Vernors-scrubbed Midwestern tone all feminine and backbone, and that voice will be right there, now and forever.
I was thinking about these things – more eloquently than I can capture with words, of course – as I read through Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks, a delightful new book by Annie Spence. For many years, Annie Spence was Annie Authier, girlfriend to my friend Brian Siers. Annie was funny and smart and easy to like, so I enjoyed talking to her about pop culture and crafts and books and work, and since she was kind, she evinced no great discomfort talking to an old obnoxious dude about such things as well. While Brian and Annie were together for many years, it was clear after a point that their lives were going in different directions, and they broke up. In the aftermath, being Brian’s friend for quite some time, I went for a scorched earth policy of deleting Annie from social media and not communicating with her, not that we ever wrote messages via raven on the regular. And while I felt sad doing it, I felt like I was upholding some tacit agreement on the sacrifices of friendship, as sophomoric as that seems now.
Now Annie Authier the “maybe I want to write children’s books” person is Annie Spence the “I wrote an honest-to-dog fucking book” person, with an agent and personal appearances in bookstores and such. Reading her wonderful tome was like sitting with her on a slightly-too-low-to-the-ground couch on a too-warm Chicago afternoon, listening to an inventive and creative person spin wonderful scenarios of whimsy and longing and wit, feeling the energy and passion of someone who had doors to new realities opened by the power of reading. Being from similar backgrounds of uniquely northern lower Michigan semi-poverty, I always had an ear for Annie in ways that I didn’t with Brian’s other girlfriends to that point. I didn’t realize how much I missed that voice until I read Annie’s book, and it’s a nice feeling to know that, should I ever miss it again, all I have to do is open a random page, read a passage in a Vernors-scrubbed Midwestern tone all feminine and backbone, and that voice will be right there, now and forever.
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