Rosita Boland was a lonely child who wanted a dog more than anything: “a shadow creature to follow me around and to adore me unconditionally”. When no dog materialised despite wishing and praying, she invented Sky. Sky’s coat was not black or shaggy as she had longed for; it was pale sandy brown and smooth. But he would have to do because he was the one who arrived.
After Sky faded away (he hadn’t been happy, his tail had long since stopped wagging), Lucinda appeared in the narrow passageway between Boland’s house and garage and the two friends – one real, one fictional – went roller skating together in the evenings. This wasn’t an entirely uncomplicated relationship either: Boland was a little scared of Lucinda because she had seen someone die.
When their sessions came to an end because the strap on Boland’s skate broke, she felt a mix of sadness and relief that she no longer needed to summon the courage to ask the dangerous question: “What was it like to see someone die?” along with a nagging discomfort that she had failed to achieve something important.
Boland finally found perfect company in books. As a young girl she went to an inordinate amount of trouble to get an English stamp to put on a SAE to join the Puffin Membership Club. When her membership pack arrived, she glued the book plates into her favourite books straight away, wrote her name on them and wore her enamel puffin badge with pride, full of hope that someone would see it, utter the password “sniffup” (puffins spelled backwards) and become her friend, but no one ever did.
At university, where she studied modern English and history, Boland was slow to make friends and “rarely had the confidence to speak up or the conviction that I had anything remotely worth saying”. It was during her college days that she met Kit, a confident and creative architecture student who spoke French, rode a Vespa and cooked brilliantly, but who offered her only friendship when Boland wanted more.
She writes that Kit gave her the gift of curiosity – though I suspect that her gentle, unintrusive and non-judgmental curiosity is entirely innate – and that he instilled in her a desire to travel and see the world.
[Her friends] shared the belief that they hardly had the talent to be awarded a fellowship, prey to a self-doubt that seems ubiquitous among the most talented, and especially women
Friendship is the unifying theme of this beautiful, profoundly moving collection of essays – and Boland collected friends like souvenirs in her peripatetic years.
She met her “Hanger Sisters” in 2008 at Harvard (where she spent 10 months having been awarded a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism), so called after an evening when she and three other fellows found a box of clothes hangers on a curb on their way home. Three of them stuffed as many as they could into their bags and coats and walked into the night bulging with hangers. The fourth looked on appalled at the sight of her three friends foraging so unsanitarily.
The Hanger Sisters, still close friends today, shared the belief that they hardly had the talent to be awarded a fellowship, prey to a self-doubt that seems ubiquitous among the most talented, and especially women. Boland is hard on herself – she long held on to the belief that hard is always better, until she recognised herself in the character of Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Boland believed that she, like Isabel, had made the wrong choices – and Boland came to the seismic, life-changing realisation that sometimes the very simple, intuitive choice is the best one.
Boland, who has worked as a senior features writer for this newspaper for 20 years despite having no formal training as a journalist, acknowledges that while interviewees can definitely not be categorised as friends, there are some she’s never forgotten: “some tinder lit during or around the interview experience that remains among the most meaningful of my adult life, fires that still blaze in my memory”.
One such was the father who talked with “pure grace” about the loss of his son to suicide and recognised in Boland her own grief for the child she wanted but never had, who didn’t say goodbye to her on his doorstep when the interview was over, but accompanied her to her car, “a shared walk of mutual empathy”, stood in the driveway and waved and waved as she drove away.
Boland says she endeavours as a journalist to be as empathetic, responsible and ethical as possible. Comrades is an exceptional example of all three. She writes with a lightness of touch and robust integrity. Reading her book has been an immensely enjoyable experience, like getting into a bubble bath that’s the perfect temperature. It’s one that I will re-read and give as a gift to many friends of my own.
