Why I Broke Up With My Best Friend

The author, Elin Hilderbrand

Laurie Richards

Friendship between women is tricky business, which is a good thing for me, since I have made a career of writing about friendships between women. Thus far, I have eked 10 novels out of the subject. I've done the friendship forged long-ago that continues to exist because of a yearly tradition; I've done the needy friendship; I've done the friendship that, for one of the players, was more than a friendship; and I've done the estranged friends reuniting (with Meredith and Connie in my latest book, Silver Girl).

My own experience with friendship has been just as varied, just as fulfilling and just as painful. For the first 40 years of my life, I operated with one BFF at a time: my best friend from growing up, my best friend from college, my best friend from my early Nantucket days. And then, at the start of my childbearing years, my husband and I started socializing with another couple like us, who was fun like us, the new owners of a house on Nantucket like us, and starting a family just as we were.

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It was no less profound than falling in love.