That simmer life

on friendship & balance & stuff; plus some ✨ good news ✨

So, the other theme that came through loud and clear in Melinda Gates’ chat with Ann Patchett a few weeks ago was female friendship—how vital it is, how it can carry us through some of life’s hardest moments. Gates told us about her “Truth Council,” a group of friends she walks with every Monday morning at home in Seattle. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, she said of this group of friends, “ Whenever I’m going to make a really hard decision or make a big transition, I know I have to have the courage to tell them…and they’re honest with me.”

As with the whole transition thing, forces beyond my control seemed to be saying, “Listen up!” I had just enjoyed a visit with a dear old friend, Julie, who is not just any dear old friend but the kind of friend who, for decades, has given me reason to reflect on just how well friendship can be done. I mentioned her visit a few Field Trips ago, but I didn’t dig deep enough. Julie is the friend who you can count on to keep in touch; the friend who will always return an email in a timely manner; the friend who, despite a massively packed schedule and important obligations, will carve out the time for a coffee or call or walk. I saw this in action all the time years ago, when we lived in the same city in our 20s. I was frankly a bit in awe of her in those days, the way she showed up for people and the way she effortlessly connected them, too. Julie showed up in my dreams a lot for a while. I hold her up as a paragon of How to Be: thoughtful, calm, curious, caring, always sharing something she’s excited about (books, music, audio docs, etc.), and…killing it with the profesh stuff (audio!!) that clearly is her calling.

She and I don’t get to see each other often, but we stay well connected, and that’s first and foremost testament to Julie being Julie; but I dare say it’s also about how I’ve taken the lesson of the friendship moves she’s shown me and tried my best to emulate them. Not to say I always succeed. It’s a forever work-in-progress, this friendship thing. And I never stop thinking about how it’s a thing at which, for a long time, I did not excel.

If this were a full-fledged personal essay, I might now delve into how and why I think past me did a mid job at friendship. Gritty details and all that. It’s not that I was back-stabby or unethical; I just didn’t ace centering female friendship in my life. For a while it felt like a life skill that I just hadn’t honed. I got by—I had friends—but gradually I began to see a distinct difference in the way other women thought and talked about their female friends and the way my relationships tended to operate.

Some of that was due to depression, which, left unchecked, can definitely make you half the person you hope to be to and for others (and then you feel guilty, and it gets even worse). In recent years I’ve pondered how I perhaps let down friends, or simply failed to keep a connection in place when our lives took us in different directions. I have more to say about this, but for now I’ll say that I’ve put sincere effort into being a better, more reliable, more engaged friend the past several years, and I feel the ripples of that. More than ever before in my life, I look around and see women I sincerely cherish, women who teach me and cause me to question myself in good ways, women who are both like me and very different from me in their habits, interests, personality quirks, Enneagram numbers.

When I talked to Julie about this a bit, she looked thoughtful (of course), and said she always thought of me, back in our 20s in Chicago, as a loyal friend. Hmm, okay, good to hear…

But I’m convinced I’m better now. Still imperfect and still better.

Anyway, as Gates and Patchett talked about the power of female friendship, Patchett brought up something she once read in a David Sedaris essay, about the four-burner principle of life. It goes like this:

“Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four-burner stove.

“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”

Now, I recall Patchett saying something about Big Success being a ONE-burner situation (!), but maybe not. Anyway, this stuck with me. (Not least, perhaps, because I had tickets to see David Sedaris live for the first time the following week!) It made me think about balance. If you accept the four-burner logic, success requires imbalance. A balanced life, by this reasoning, might mean a life where you’re not excelling at any of these four things. You’re just doing, well, a mid job of each. Wait, I thought. A balanced life = no good?

Maybe one or two burners may be “hotter” than the others at any given time. Is this how we might define success? Not some holy-grail, pefectly calibrated life balance, but a careful consideration of which ones need to be 🔥🔥🔥 and others merely simmering? Was I, as I often am, kinda over-thinking it—and missing the message in the process?

Honestly, I suspect David Sedaris could and would happily poke holes in this little management-seminar metaphor; it seems like just the sort of thing he—and I!—would delight in skewering. (File under: Business jargon and its bedfellows.)

But that aside, the lil’ stovetop story did help me think about the heat-centers of a life. What it affirms for me is something I’ve been thinking about for years regarding my Writing Life: That it might take a lot more selfishness, a lot more centering of my creative work, to really super-duper excel at it. That degree of centering, I’m not gonna lie, is something I have yearned for. At the same time, I look at the fullness of my life—which, in our stovetop situation, looks like four burners quietly simmering, most of the time, never going cold or up in flames—and I think this isn’t such a bad way to do life.

Have I sacrificed writing time to be with friends and family and to do paying work? Oh, yes. And I’ve been quietly resentful about it, many times. Has this also often felt like a fair trade? Yep.

Look, that’s just the truth for me; it’s not true for all, and as Ann and David are getting at, I think, it’s probably not as true for folks who are out there winning big prizes and whatnot for their creative work. They’ve made some big sacrifices to get to that point. (Or they’re just stone-cold geniuses/superhumans. Look, let’s face it: These creatures walk among us!)

This writing has ambled off course a bit, as it is wont to do, from friendship to the creative life—but for me that simply affirms the truth that friendship is never actually set apart from the rest of life’s bizness. The burners are all on the stovetop together, with their saucepans possibly boiling over, spitting little bits of warm sustenance into each other’s eyes. Blah blah blah!

When I went to see David Sedaris read in Nashville, a few days after the Gates/Patchett convo, he shared a piece about his good old friend Dawn, who often travels with him on book tour. They met in college. Now they walk together, a lot. He paints an amazing portrait of her, a bit of a roast but deeply loving. (Ah, that Sedaris magic!) It’s a great piece of writing, and I think you should read it.

So there it was again: friendship. Theme o’ April 2025. That week, also in the mix for me were plans being made with various groups of women I am plum full of gratitude to call friends. My birthday approacheth-ed. It was a very friend-centric time, these late April days.

And now it’s May, and the “work” burner is turned up because tonight is The Porch’s annual fundraiser, our biggest event of the year. These occasions can’t help but remind me how many friendships have grown out of this work, and how the work has folded in existing friendships. I admit, it’s overwhelming for me to stand in the hot-hot intersection of the two for an hour, over cocktails and nibbles, trying to be a Graceful and Gracious Host Leader Person. But in my heart I really am bursting with gratitude. And this year’s event is especially rich on the friendship tip because my friends Margaret Renkl and Mary Laura Philpott are our featured literary queens. 170 friends of The Porch will bask in the glow of the friendship they’ve cultivated, which has everything to do with their creative lives and much more, too. Nothing is ever just one thing.

Ok and so finally, I’m going to drop some good news here! Still on theme, I figure, because this good thing would not be happening without all kinds of support from a ridiculously large cast of friends over the years. Gonna need a whole ‘nother book for the Acknowledgements section:

Keywords: music, rock ‘n’ roll, creativity, tryin to make a life outta art, baking, getalong gigs, chicago, nashville, mid-aughts, fathers, daughters, prodigalness, loss, grief, f’kn’ up

If you know someone who likes books about artists trying to live their little lives, maybe tell them about it? 🙏

Songs for the week (Songs FTW!):

Two songs by friends, natch. Kat and Abby, y’all rock.

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