Chapter One
Chapter One
There are a few things that if brewed, bottled, and sold could make a person a billionaire overnight. Immortality, a way to live forever, is one. Another is friendship, a way to instantly create connection. But both immortality and making friends as an adult were equally impossible in R’s eyes.
She had tried mastering solitude, venturing out to art galleries, taking long walks, attending the cinema alone…
but even though she enjoyed each of those activities enough, the fact that there was no one to share them with was the problem.
She’d had three close friends once upon a time, but then M had gotten married and left for Oxford, L followed suit but chose Los Angeles, and N chose her villain of an ex-boyfriend.
This series of unfortunate events had been a terrible blow because, if there is anything you ought to know about R, it’s that she’s a sharer, specifically of food, conversation, and experiences.
Now friendless, she attempted to combine all three by attending a cooking class, but everyone had turned up with someone.
She then tried a pottery workshop, but only three people came, and after short, polite chitchat, everyone stuck to their own wheel.
She even joined a spin studio, but canceled her membership before the month was over.
R would pay for many a thing, but being yelled at (or “motivated”) while dripping in sweat and fighting off a heart attack could not be one of them.
Now that R was running out of money, she could no longer afford to practice the art of making friends, something she strongly felt should be free.
The one tip R knew she would pass on to any child looking for advice would be to make friends at school and/or at work.
Doing it anywhere else can be financially draining.
To add to R’s growing loneliness, she was also struggling to write.
Yes, you read that correctly. An author was struggling to write a book.
Her first had been all about friendship, its genesis and near ends, its ups and downs and in-betweens.
It was the first book R had written that included small parts of her own life that she’d fictionalized and built on.
Before that, her unpublished canon consisted of a vampire romance which was widely rejected due to a “saturated market,” a teenage spy novel that “while entertaining, didn’t have a definitive hook,” and a story about an all-female gang based in 1960s London that was probably still languishing in various agency slush piles.
Then she struck gold with Life with Friends , securing both an agent and a two-book deal in quick succession. R had not struck gold since.
But she had not stopped digging either.
R’s literary agent T was not the easiest to please.
She’d turned down (or rather, editorially annihilated), all of R’s second-book offerings until R lacked the confidence to pursue any of them further.
After a cry and a good night’s sleep following each rejection, R could see the truth in the points her agent made.
There was no heart in her stories. So, R turned to the tried and tested method of “writing what you know.” But the only topic R knew with certainty was friendship.
She had not been heartbroken romantically or ousted from family; she’d never witnessed a crime (fortunately) or gathered any industry secrets (unfortunately).
She didn’t know how to cook, bake, garden, or any other tangible skill that might lend itself to nonfiction; she only knew how to write about her friends.
Yet, whenever she tried to write about friendship now, R realized she had nothing new to say.
When R had joked about writing a story on making friends as an adult, her own mother delicately pointed out, “Well, darling”—even reaching out to lovingly stroke R’s arm—“if you’re writing from experience, it could end up quite a depressing read, don’t you think?”
Mothers.
You can’t live with them… but with current rental prices being what they are, you can’t afford to live without them, either.