Téa Mutonji is the author of My Person, out today from Putnam. Below, she discusses unexpectedly living through a friendship break-up after writing a novel about a friendship break-up.
About two weeks after submitting the copyedits for my friendship break-up novel, I found myself suddenly experiencing one in real life.
I was walking around my apartment cooling off from an argument with {best friend of thirteen years} when I sent a text I didn’t even realize was a break-up: I would like to move on from this version of our friendship.
She called immediately, but considering our inability to effectively communicate, I thought texting from my apartment, from her townhouse with exactly 79.7 kilometers between us, would give us permission to reflect and self-regulate. Of course, I didn’t say that to her. Not in an “I want you to read my mind,” sort of way, but because we’d been down this road before.
I stared at the missed call notification on my screen, feeling hot. I’d written a novel about something like this and, in the aftermath, I knew nothing about it at all.
I didn’t rationally know I was initiating a break-up, until I found myself waiting a day, two, five days for her to meet me the way I had presented myself. I had, feverishly, become my own protagonist.
Two months went by in this silence. The longest we’d ever gone without speaking. That’s what ended the friendship.
When I think about the choice not to reach out again, not to repair, I realize now that a break-up is a collaboration. A meeting point. A Viennese Waltz.
This may sound obvious, but I didn’t know that while working on the novel, at least not consciously. In the five years I spent writing, researching, and talking to {BF13} about these foreign characters, it never occurred to me that it takes two people to let go.
When it’s real, there are no true villains. It is not Tania vs. Margot, or me vs. her. It is us vs. the break-up.
And if you’re going to do it, as a final act of love, do it together.
For more like this, sign up for the Book Riot Newsletter!
