#5. The Friends We Meet In College
Thoughts about friendships as we age, inspired by Fleishman Is in Trouble
Hi! Issue #5 is all about old friendships as inspired by the Hulu mini series, Fleishman In in Trouble. No, I didn’t read the book first, but from what I hear, the series is extremely faithful to the novel so I feel like I probably don’t need to read it?? I’ll try to avoid extremely large spoilers in this issue in case you haven’t seen it yet, but it will NOT be totally spoiler free. It’s not really the type of show you need to be unspoiled for, though, so I’ll think you’ll be fine if you read this issue before watching the series. It may actually make you want to watch it if you weren’t planning on it. Here we go!
“I was always trying to make sense of the world, understand it, and make peace with it. I thought, if I could just do that, then I could start to live my life. Today, I’m here to tell you, I give up. I will never understand it. And so I should do what every part of my body is telling me to do, and that is to ask the prettiest girl in this room if she would marry me. It’s all a lot simpler than I thought it would be. I just want to wake up every day and see her face.” –Seth Morris, Fleishman Is in Trouble
Like Seth Morris–a bachelor in his early 40s who spent a lot of time in his 20s-30s focused on his career in a large city, played by the much beloved Adam Brody–I just got engaged. Even though I’m slightly younger than Seth, I am also one of the very last of my friends to do so. Like Seth implies in the above speech where he’s explaining himself to all his closest friends and family before proposing, by waiting to settle down when a majority of my friends were all getting married and some were also beginning to have children or get divorced, I found a certain clarity in love that was incredibly simple once I found the right person to share a life with. I may never make sense of the world and my place in it, but at least I’ll always have him.
One of the very first things you have to do when you’re planning a wedding is make a list of all the friends and family members you want to be there with you on the day. This is important because it directly informs what sort of venue you’ll need to accommodate your entire guest list; it might even dictate what city you choose to get married in, what time of year you tie the knot, or whether kids will be in attendance. Creating a list of family members to include might vary in difficulty depending on your family history, but deciding on which of your friends to invite to your wedding might be universally more onerous.
In a perfect world, we’d be able to invite everyone we were ever close with; planning a huge wedding in a fantasy land in which we stayed in touch with everyone we had ever called a close friend, where no friendships had ever soured, fallen away, or changed along with our life circumstances. Unfortunately, we live in a reality where sometimes it’s necessary to face hard truths, and guest lists are not infinite. At some point it becomes imperative to examine our friendships for how they really stand, instead of clinging to our idealized version of relationships that may exist mostly in our memories.
I’ve been thinking a lot about some of my older friendships for almost a year now, when it became clear I’d be getting married in the near future. The “friends” section of my half of our guest list has changed more times than I can count. Although Fleishman Is in Trouble is mostly a story about divorce, the challenges of midlife, and the search for meaning, it’s also about friendships as we age; a story about three friends from college in similar/different circumstances and their relationships with each other from their 20s into their early 40s. And while I couldn’t relate to the struggle of feeling like the person you married has changed or the difficulties of raising children and still having a career–themes that are hugely present in Fleishman Is in Trouble–I zoomed in to the relationship between main characters Toby, Libby, and Seth, looking for clues about my own college friendships and where they might end up.
“Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exceptions are the friends you make in college.” –Libby Epstein, Fleishman Is in Trouble
This is a declaration presented by Libby (played by Lizzy Caplan), Toby Fleishman’s best female friend from college and the narrator of the series, who he hasn’t spoken to in 12 years before reaching out to her on the advice of a therapist after going through divorce. It’s said in the very last episode, right after Seth–their other college best friend who everyone takes a little less seriously because he hasn’t “settled down” yet–proposes to his girlfriend at a huge party he threw just for the occasion. This line made me sad, not only for what it says about the sometimes fleeting nature of many friendships, but also because it isn’t true for me. I envy the author and series creator, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, if she believes this idea based on personal experiences, but I’m not wholly convinced that she does.
It’s a lovely thought: that there will be friends you’ll have your entire adult life even when the going gets hard. Friendships that, no matter what, will survive every move, life event, and unanswered phone call. But the people we were in our late teens and early 20s don’t necessarily reflect the people we will become a decade or so later, as our brains stop developing and we decide what kind of person we’re going to be. And as we change throughout the wild ride that is our 20s, how could we actually expect all of those relationships from when we were young to survive intact?
A stroll down memory lane
Each one of my college friendships tells a different story. Some are straightforward and simple to explain, offering a simple status report 12 years after graduation, while others are undeniably more convoluted. I went to college in beautiful Denver, Colorado–a perfect combination of a big city that’s still close to nature and one of the sunniest places in the country. I moved to Los Angeles right after graduation, and back to Minneapolis/St. Paul about a year ago. A majority of my college friends stayed in Denver and the surrounding cities in Colorado, where they still reside nearly 12 years later. Of all my closest friends, only two of us left the state right after graduation. I guess at the time I expected that almost everyone would leave, and when they didn’t, it made me feel like the odd woman out.
For a long time, I tried to see it as a positive. All my friends are in one place! It will be so easy for me to visit! But that feeling only lasted for a few years, as it became increasingly “my responsibility” as the person who left to come back and visit as often as possible. My college friendships were pretty solid, though, for about five or six years after graduation. I did a little math and realized, based on a conversation between Toby, Libby, and Seth, that the dropoff in their friendship timeline almost perfectly matches mine. In the first episode, we find out that the last time they were all together was sometime in their late 20s (after Toby’s wedding, when he was 26, but before Libby’s, when she was 30). This rings true for me as well. The last time I can remember being all together with my college friends was, of course, at a wedding in 2017, when I was 28. There’s a photo of me from that wedding on Facebook that was posted the following year on my 29th birthday, and the caption reads: “Hello to this beautiful birthday babe! 11 years of friendship down, 111 to go!” I haven’t spoken to the person who posted it in over two years.
Leaving college in 2011, my best friends were two sorority sisters with an incredibly tight bond that I infiltrated and insisted we become a trio. Erin* had actually been my roommate our sophomore year, and Sarah* was her best friend. They adopted me into their sorority as an honorary member and we all lived happily together in a shitty little house our senior year. They introduced me to our friend Genevieve*, who just got married last fall, and we catch up whenever we can.
Erin was the introverted, stable one who always took school as seriously as I did. She volunteered one summer in New York for Hillary Clinton, long before she ran for president. When I lived in LA, we’d see each other at least once a year when she’d come to visit her aunt and sister, and we’d pick up right where we left off. We went to concerts, brunches, and weddings together for over a decade. We had a friendship I assumed would last for a lifetime, until we lost touch in 2020. Erin’s father died six years ago, and I think it marked a turning point in her life where she was never quite the same after that. I tried to support her in every way I knew how, but nothing ever seemed to offer her what she needed from me. I still text every year on her birthday, but my messages go unanswered, and her social media footprint is nearly invisible. Even if I wanted to invite her to our wedding, I wouldn’t know where to send the invitation.
Sarah and I perhaps have the most complicated story of all. A line-dancing spitfire who knows how to have a good time, Sarah and I were always incredibly different, but somehow we made our friendship work. Although everyone I went to college with was generally on the liberal side of the political spectrum, Sarah married someone who leans pretty hard in the other direction. In the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 and a post on her Facebook account I couldn’t agree with, I called Sarah to have a talk about politics and race. It was a hard conversation, and we didn’t speak again aside from simple birthday texts until about two weeks ago.
“We’re all good, right? Feels like something is ending. I can’t take an ending right now.” –Seth Morris, Fleishman Is in Trouble
Like Fleishman’s old college friends in the series, Sarah and I caught up recently after a long hiatus from our friendship. And like on the show, a lot had changed. I’d moved across the country and gotten engaged to someone I hadn’t even met the last time we spoke, while Sarah had finished her doctoral degree, started a new job, moved back to Colorado after being out of state for school, and is trying for kids. Two years doesn’t necessarily seem like a long time, but in your 30s? I swear it is.
After about an hour on the phone, when I had migrated to the floor and both literally and metaphorically wrapped myself in a blanket, we dipped a toe into talking about what happened between us two years ago. Sarah shared with me that she had lost a lot of friends since then, and I was shocked to learn that I was the only person to send her a birthday text this year. Her relationship with Erin is apparently almost non-existent, and has been for some time. “I genuinely feel like I don’t have any friends anymore” she told me, laughing in the kind of way you do when something really isn’t funny at all.
The end of our conversation reminded me of one of the final scenes in the show, when Toby and Libby tell each other how sorry they are for not being good friends to one another, both knowing they are at fault. But there was a bit of a finality to our conversation, like in Fleishman; an unspoken vibe of an “ending” that Seth picks up on before he leaves the group when his fiancé calls to him from across the room. I left my conversation with Sarah not knowing when, or if, we’d talk again; feeling nostalgic for a friendship that once meant so much to me, but also pulled in the direction of the life that I love that she isn’t a part of.
Libby: “I love you so much. You know that, right?”
Toby: “I haven’t been a good friend to you lately.”
Libby: “It’s okay. You’ve been going through a lot.”
Toby: “But I want you to know, you are still you. I can see it all. I can see your darkness, I can see your goodness, it is still there, like the day we met. Okay?
–Fleishman Is in Trouble
As I get older and life becomes more filled with obligations and meaningful distractions, the more I have realized that I have a limited amount of mental and emotional energy to expend on friendships. I spend a considerable percentage of my time maintaining my closest long-distance friendships from LA since I made the decision to move across the country a year ago, and I’m also starting to focus on making friends in my new city as well. As I face the question of who to include on the final guest list for our wedding, this quandary has already consumed countless hours of time and I don’t yet have a final decision. How much energy can (or should) I put into friendships that I’m not sure can be mended? At what point do I decide to let some failing friendships go, and redirect that energy towards making new friends in my new city? Is nostalgia a legitimate reason to hold on to a friendship that’s on life support? Or are some older friendships better left in the past?
*Names have been changed to protect their privacy
Back to Fleishman
“How can you live when you used to have unlimited choices? And you don’t have them anymore?” –Libby Epstein, Fleishman Is in Trouble
As a series, Fleishman Is in Trouble has undeniable strengths and weaknesses. To the detriment of the story’s central couple, Toby and Rachel Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes), it’s clear that the trio of Toby, Seth, and Libby was prioritized during casting. These three (Jesse Eisenberg, Adam Brody, and Lizzy Caplan) just make so much sense together, especially as slightly estranged friends from college who find themselves in very different periods of their lives when they come back together again after more than a decade apart. Their chemistry leaps off the screen, and many of the best scenes involve these three characters rediscovering their friendships, in some ways so familiar, but also undeniably changed.
Claire Danes is also brilliant as Rachel, even if her lack of romantic chemistry with Jesse Eisenberg borderline ruins the series. These two play contentious exes really well–too well–and I found myself rooting for them to break up during literally every flashback scene. But Rachel’s friendships (or lack thereof) play a small part in the series too, which I found fascinating and enjoyed so much more than watching her spar with Toby. At times she plays the villain, having an affair with her friend’s husband after accidentally naming him as her “hall pass” at a party, and at times I had so much empathy for her, especially as we learn more about her traumatic backstory in episode seven.
Interestingly, we don’t get a lot about Libby’s friendships with other women throughout Fleishman Is in Trouble (Libby’s only real friends that we see are Toby and Seth). Libby worked for years as one of the only female writers at a men’s magazine and seems to have some sort of inherent distrust of other women. But one of the best parts of the series is when Libby finds an extremely confused Rachel–someone we know she never got along with–sitting on a park bench, very clearly in distress. Libby takes Rachel home and listens to her side of the story that we’ve heard Toby telling from his point of view for several episodes, flipping the script on everything we thought we knew. At one point, after Libby tucks her in bed, Rachel says, “You know, I always liked you. I just thought you didn’t like me.” It’s a very poignant moment that made me think about a few almost-friendships in my past that never were, or how a sometimes simple lack of communication can undermine an entire would-be relationship.
It’s easy for me to see a bit of myself in each character from Fleishman Is in Trouble. I related to Toby’s need to “do good” when it comes to a career choice and his criticisms of some jobs that make more money but feel corrupt, Rachel’s desire for financial safety and security and her tendency to overwork, Libby’s dream to be taken seriously as a writer and use words to somehow find meaning in her life, and Seth’s willingness to take a huge leap of faith in love coupled with a deep longing to just “belong to people.” As much as I love Claire Danes, I found Lizzy Caplan to be the absolute star of the show, whose character Libby is apparently somewhat based on the author herself.
Though it’s not perfect, I recommend this show to anyone who has deep feelings about the current state of their changing friendships, is going through divorce, or is struggling to find meaning in their lives. Although it slogs a little in the middle, the entire series is worth watching for the last episode, which was an absolute smash. I’ve watched it three times and still can’t get enough. If you’re a person who enjoys poetic, hugely emotional moments between characters who may be imperfect but feel incredibly real, run don’t walk to watch Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Libby: “I think I might write a book. About life, and marriage, and money, and dissatisfaction and lifelong friendship and how all these things coalesce in the middle age. And make you miserable right at the exact point that you’re supposed to have everything set. Yeah… it will be about everything.“
Toby: “Everything. That’s heavy.”
Libby: “Maybe, but what’s the point of writing about anything if it’s not going to be about everything? That’s what Archer did. Maybe I’ll be better than Archer. You know, I’ll tell a really good story, but I’ll tell all the other sides of it, not just the ones that I like.”
–Fleishman Is in Trouble
What’s Up This Week
2019 Mondavi Napa Cabernet
Availability: HUGE. This wine should be easy to find, should you choose to do so.
MSRP: $40ish
Worth it: Kinda...not. We could probably throw 30 other California wines at you with a better price to quality ratio. This review is not focused so much on the merits of the wine, but rather, is a warning.
Discovered: Kelly’s dad bought this wine in a local wine shop and gave it to us over Christmas.
Appearance: Medium opacity, surprising! Pinkish crimson hue.
Nose: Notes of briary red fruit, classy Napa red currant, green stems. Imagine if you took a weed wacker to a thorny fruit bush and went to town on it. Summery, with a hint of pine resin. Dare I say it… somewhat feminine? More class than power. More intrigue than brute strength.
Palate: There is that stemmy flavor again! Along with bread dough and semi-ripe juneberries. We are very much in the tart, red end of the fruit spectrum. Flavors of unground peppercorns and bell pepper seeds are present, which is classic Cabernet. And then that huge cedar factor from the new oak this wine has aged in, with a bitter finish.
Conclusions: This is a PSA to not spend $40 on this wine expecting a big, bold Napa Cab. It’s something else. Essentially, it seems to me that the Mondavi family is playing a charade at our expense. They’ve diluted their brilliant fruit and packaged it in the same bottle that in previous years, bore greatness! This wine is a Trojan horse! It gets into your house because it has a great reputation, but as soon as it’s opened, all hell breaks loose in terms of your expectations. It’s not a bad wine, and certainly drinkable, but one to avoid if you are in the mood for that big, bold, powerful flavor profile that made this region so damned famous.
I have had “By Your Side” by Sade in my head all week after watching the finale episode of Fleishman Is in Trouble three times. (If you’re not sure if you know this song; you do. Hit play.)
I just finished How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a trippy work of speculative fiction that is a total gut punch. It’s a series of interlinked short stories that all deal with the aftermath of a global plague that is unleashed on the world sometime around 2030 as the ice in Siberia melts due to climate change. It’s unbelievably emotional, inventive, and gut-wrenching. A few of the chapters made me cry. I gave it an 8.5/10 and would recommend it to anyone who loved Sea of Tranquility, Cloud Atlas, or The Space Between Worlds, as long as you know that it is as creative and expansive as it is heavy. Make no mistake, this book is beautiful, but it is about death.
If you’ve read it, my favorite chapter was the very last one, “The Scope of Possibility,” that ties every chapter together and expands beyond it in such a stunning way (no spoilers… but it was insane). I was also super fucked up by “City of Laughter” about a theme park designed to humanely euthanize dying children, “Songs of Your Decay” about a married scientist who falls in love with her dying patient, who she will be performing an autopsy on after he dies to learn more about the virus inside his body, and “A Gallery A Century, A Cry A Millennium” about the U.S.S. Yamoto’s mission through the stars to find another Earth.
I also found out while casually reading the author bio in the back of the book that Sequoia Nagamatsu lives in Minneapolis! So cool!!!!! He is a professor at St. Olaf, where my parents went to college, and a major Star Trek fan. I die.
Paul and I watched the first episode of the new zombie-apocalypse HBO show, The Last of Us, and we will both be back to watch the next episode on Sunday. When I heard that the show is based on a video game I was skeptical, but then I read that it was actually getting good reviews, and I looove Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey (both from one of my all-time favs, Game of Thrones). While the premise really isn’t all that new (I’d compare it to The Walking Dead and Children of Men), so far the storyline and acting is enough to keep me watching another week.
In other TV news, I no longer have Disney+, but I am considering re-subscribing just to watch Andor, the new Star Wars series that functions as a prequel to Rogue One. Has anyone watched this yet who can tell me if it’s worth it?
That’s it for me. See you next week!
K bye,
Kelly
P.S. One of my favorite newsletters,
, had a guest writer on Sunday who wrote about “The Friend Recession,” which is basically the idea that smartphones and the pandemic have caused us all to start hanging out with each other less and less in real life. The writer, Mallory Rice, moved to Montana a year ago after living in Brooklyn for 15 years, so I related a lot to what she says in her essay about feelings of loneliness and making new friends. Give it a read if you’re interested in more talk about friendships.