Friends with Claire Dederer

I want to be friends with Claire Dederer. I am still mispronouncing her name so I know I have work to do before approaching her, but I have the quiet confidence that we’d get on. This internalised belief that a select few people will like me and be my friend has been my constant companion. I’ve had a few quite targeted friendships, and a lot of targeted relationships. Very few people just arrive in my life uninvited – although my closest circle of friends all came to me that way which I should maybe reflect upon. 

I want to make friends with older women who are smarter than me, I want wisdom poured from above. I was drowning in negative press about my own imminent decline when Claire Dederer saved me. I read her memoir Love and Trouble years ago and felt a resonance (which is I understand the whole point of good memoir writing) but then, just recently, I read Monster which framed so many interesting questions about the conundrum of monstrosity in the creation of artistic output that I felt mentally fizzed, like a sherbet had been poured into my atrophying soupy brain and woken it up. Then I looked at her bio and was fucking ECSTATIC to see that she was around ten years older than me. It’s going to be ok, I thought, this brilliant sharp shit came out of a brain that is ten years older than mine, and even if this woman is a different class of genius than I will ever be, this gives me hope. I then went back and re-read Love and Trouble, which is brilliant but much more chaotic and unresolved, and I realised ‘ah’, she wrote that when she was the age I am now. This makes sense, this is how I feel right now – unresolved, untethered, nostalgic but also frustrated about my inability to engage with my own future. Thinking a lot about the girl and woman I was and how I got here, and what that backstory means for the expectations I place on myself going forward. 

But what would I have to offer a brilliant older woman in a friendship deal? As a deeply introverted social strategist I have always considered this question before barrelling in. I haven’t got the answer but it does kick up some nostalgia dust thinking about the many ages of me, sitting in solemn contemplation about my exchange value, thinking about my utility as a way of fending off the exhaustion and irritation I fear inspiring in others. Jesus Anna, give it a rest, dial it down a few notches with all the thoughts about things. 

Like Claire Dederer, when I was young my exchange value was my sexual availability, and as it was a much much more heteronormative age, this meant that I mainly hung around with and befriended men. I am a product of the age of the laddette, the uk branding for the girl who is hot (crucially) but also drinks pints and shoots pool and (crucially) isn’t uptight about shit men want to do. If you weren’t hot then you could hover close to the brand ambassadors by doing pints and sex with no drama – no drama included no complaining about lad culture, lad culture was our culture with an ‘ette’ added which denoted a crop top and low slung jeans. Claire knows what I’m talking about, she was blazing that trail in the much cooler environs of late 80s Seattle. I won’t hear of it when she tells me Seattle in the late 80s wasn’t cool. Our equivalent hang outs were the steps of municipal buildings and baked potato concessions in food courts. 

But what am I talking about, I was in my early twenties when laddette culture took hold, I was a hollowed out husk of a young mother by then. My exchange value had been floated by then. My exchange value age 14 = sexual availability, no drama and discretion; age 15 add being able to skin up competently to the mix and I was hot property. The sex and the drugs carried me high over my peers until I hit 16 and had to up my game. I learned to cook, I kid you not. All this and she cooks.

 But Claire can cook, and my sexual currency has been withdrawn from circulation (at least the bit where you cash the cheque) and it’s years since I skinned up (confident I would still be good at this). I’m all out of tricks and ideas.

Maybe I am hoping to win her over with my smarts? Deep down I have always wanted to win people over with my smarts. I want to be funny and open to new ideas and hard to shock. I want to be loyal and trusted for my loyalty. I want to be liked even if I am not needed. Little girls who were sexually exploited can grow into women who find it hard to believe that we could be liked for being smart and loyal and funny, that people might want our company just because we are fun to chat to. If I always turn up at your house with a small offering of food or flowers, this is why.

 I do want to be friends with Claire Dederer, in my mind palace where I also perform excellent flash mob coordinated dance routines to select tunes in my headphones and finally get the obliterative last word with that utter shit of an ex-boyfriend. My imagination is full of would-be friendships with brilliant women I’ve read and listened to, who were generous enough to share their minds with me on their terms, and that is enough. I suppose.

https://www.clairedederer.com/