The Beautiful Words: Vanessa McCausland explores friendship in new book

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Vanessa McCausland has had many friendships come and go — but there was one that gave her inspiration for her new book.

I have had friends who I thought would be forever but who disappeared in the blink of an eye, and friends who seemed like fleeting things only to become my boat rowers. My mother once described them this way, the people who help us navigate the choppy waters of life. The people with us in the boat.

“Who is helping you row your boat at the moment?” she would ask, and that is when I understood the difference between good friends and soul friends.

These are the friends who see us at our most thin-skinned, who we call on in our hour of need, who always want the best for us, truly, not in a half-hearted, half-resentful way. They are few and special and often times we meet them during adolescence, on the cusp of adulthood, when we pass from our childhood innocence and reckon with the real world. Perhaps it’s that reckoning that bonds us forever.

I wanted to explore the nature of these seeming soul-mate friendships in my novel The Beautiful Words. I wanted to ask, what is the alchemy at play in close friendship?

My protagonists Sylvie and Kase meet in Year 7 and are inseparable throughout their high school years, until something happens to cleave them apart. They don’t speak to each other for 23 years, and Sylvie is left wondering what really happened that summer night, the night of an accident that changed their lives forever?

I’ve had friends who were once in my boat who I naturally grew apart from, who I watched walk away towards the shore, knowing that our time together had passed. And that has been sad, but it’s the ones that slip from the boat in the dead of night that have haunted me.

One very good friend declared our friendship over via email and told me not to reply as she would never respond again. And for years I would dream of her, as though my subconscious was trying to find closure.

It wasn’t until we met again through mutual friends many years later and got on just as well as when we were teenagers, that I finally found that closure. There was a mutual understanding that we did have a strong connection, but that our friendship was something that had run its course. We didn’t ‘friend’ each other on social media, and I never dreamed of her again.

Another close friend in my 20s disappeared after we’d had a very deep, honest discussion when she was at a major turning point in her life. I still don’t understand why she never again returned my calls, but perhaps something I said had cut too close to the bone. It is always the not knowing that is the most painful many years later.

In The Beautiful Words Sylvie has a chance to finally get closure, to discover why Kase abandoned her 23 years ago. Out of the blue Kase sends Sylvie an invitation to her 40th birthday on a tiny island off the Tasmanian coast and Sylvie accepts, hoping that their connection will still be there, needing answers about something that has haunted her for half her life.

But once in Tasmania Sylvie struggles to find her feet amongst old friends. She’s changed. She’s no longer the gifted writer they remember, after she lost her memory in the accident that summer night. This is a book about the fallible nature of memory, and it asks what can be forgiven within a friendship.

I think the past 18 months of Covid has shifted the way we view friendships.

It has given us the space and perspective to understand which of our friends we really want to make time for. Suddenly our worlds shrunk and many outside our boats drifted away.

It has shown me freshly, who my boat rowers are. The ones who I chose to walk around the neighbourhood block dozens of times with, who I didn’t need lunch and a glass of Prosecco to catch up with.

The ones who made me laugh even when it felt like the world was ending. The ones who I’m so connected to that I know I would travel to Tasmania to see, even after 23 years of silence.

Vanessa McCausland’s new novel The Beautiful Words is out now through HarperCollins.

Burnt Out, By Victoria Brookman, is our January Book of the Month. Get your copy for 30 per cent off the RRP at Booktopia by using the code BURNT at checkout.



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