The Women We Call
On friendship, distance, and the people who know us well
I was on the phone with my friend Jo.
We met years ago, when I was living in Suffolk. We sang in the same choir, had dinners together, talked about our families and our lives. I don't live there anymore, but somehow the friendship stayed.
That day, I had been worrying about my younger son.
He's grown now, living his own life, but apparently nobody told the part of me that is his mother. I was doing what I sometimes do—going over things in my head, wondering whether he was okay, whether I should do something, whether I wasn't doing enough.
Jo listened.
Then she said:
“Ale, he's a grown man. You've done your part. Let him live his path. This is your time now—to love your husband, to find joy, to come back to you.”
It was very Jo.
Warm, but direct.
And perhaps because it was Jo saying it, I could hear it.
Nothing dramatic happened after we hung up. I didn't suddenly stop worrying about my son. I didn't have some great realization.
I just felt a little lighter.
And I've thought about that conversation since.
There are people who know enough of our history to recognize when we're getting lost in the same old thoughts again. They don't necessarily have better answers than we do.
Sometimes they simply see us from a little farther away.
Jo did that for me.
Maybe that's one of the things friendship can be.
Not someone who fixes you.
Someone who knows you well enough to say, Ale, look at this differently.
And you do.
Or at least you try.
What Friendship Gives Us
There is plenty of research showing that good social relationships matter to our health and well-being.
I believe it.
But I don't need research to tell me what happened on that phone call.
Friendship gives us something difficult to give ourselves: another perspective on our own lives.
A good friend has often seen several versions of us.
She remembers who we were before the job, the marriage, the children, the divorce, the move, the loss—or whatever else came along and rearranged things.
She knows some of our contradictions.
She may even know which stories we tell ourselves over and over.
And sometimes she'll let us tell them again.
Sometimes she'll say, Enough now.
That's friendship too.
I've become less interested in the idea that a good friend is someone who is always supportive if “supportive” means agreeing with everything I say.
Some of the women I value most are the ones who can disagree with me without making me feel diminished.
They listen.
They tell me what they think.
They make me laugh.
And after months apart, we can start talking and somehow find the thread again.
Distance changes a friendship.
Life changes it too.
But some friendships learn how to change with us.
I think those are the ones we keep.
A Question to Carry With You
Who is a woman you can call when you need someone to see what you can't quite see for yourself?
Maybe you spoke yesterday.
Maybe you haven't spoken in months.
You don't have to turn it into a gratitude exercise.
Just think of her.
Women We Know, Friendships We Don't
The friendship between Jo and me is private. Most friendships are.
The ones we're about to look at are different because the women involved are well known, and parts of their relationships have played out in public.
I don't pretend to know what happens inside someone else's friendship.
But I am interested in what these women have said about one another—the years they've stayed connected, the ways they've described showing up for each other, and what their friendships seem to have meant at different points in their lives.
Not because famous women are better at friendship.
But because sometimes seeing a relationship from the outside makes us think about the ones in our own lives.
Here are six that made me stop and look a little closer.
Oprah Winfrey & Gayle King — Almost Fifty Years of Friendship
Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King met in 1976, when they were both working at a television station in Baltimore.
Their friendship really began during a snowstorm. Oprah invited Gayle, who couldn't get home, to stay at her place for the night.
They've been friends ever since.
What I find interesting about them isn't simply that the friendship has lasted nearly fifty years. Plenty of relationships last a long time without necessarily remaining close.
It's the way they talk about each other.
They've lived very different lives, made different choices, raised families differently and built separate careers. Yet when you see them together, there is an ease between them that can't really be manufactured.
Oprah once described Gayle as:
“She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves.”
That's a lot for one person to be.
But after nearly fifty years, perhaps you earn the right to say it.
Listen to them talk
In this conversation with Melinda French Gates, Oprah and Gayle talk about friendship, aging and the changes that come with different stages of life.
Watch:🔗 Moments That Make Us: Oprah & Gayle on Friendship and Life’s Big Changes
What I like about watching them isn't that they have something profound to say every minute.
Sometimes they're just two old friends talking.
That's rather the point.
Jane Fonda & Lily Tomlin — Friendship With Room for Laughter
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin met while making 9 to 5 in 1980.
More than four decades later, they're still friends.
They've worked together repeatedly, shared political causes, grown older in public and, perhaps most importantly, continued to make each other laugh.
Watch them together for a few minutes and you notice something immediately: neither seems particularly interested in making the other look dignified.
I love that.
There's affection, but there's also teasing, interruption and the familiarity that comes from knowing someone for a very long time.
Maybe friendship doesn't always need to be profound.
Maybe sometimes its great gift is having someone who remembers several versions of you—and can still make you laugh at the current one.
Watch them together
In this conversation on The Late Show, Jane and Lily talk about their decades-long friendship in exactly the way you might expect them to: with affection and very little restraint.
Watch: 🔗 How Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda Keep the Love Alive After 40 Years of Friendship
Taylor Swift & Selena Gomez — A Friendship That Grew Up With Them
Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez became friends when they were both very young and already living unusually public lives.
That was in 2008.
A lot has happened since.
Careers changed. Relationships came and went. Their lives were discussed, photographed and judged by millions of people who didn't actually know either of them.
And somehow, the friendship remained.
That's what interests me about these two.
Growing up changes friendships even when nobody is watching. We become different people. We move. We marry. We have children—or don't. Our priorities change. Sometimes a friendship that once made perfect sense simply doesn't anymore.
Taylor and Selena have spoken publicly over the years about continuing to support one another through some of those changes.
I don't know what their friendship is like when the cameras are gone.
But I like the idea of two women meeting young and continuing to recognize each other as their lives become something neither of them could have predicted at the beginning.
There's something very ordinary about that inside two very unordinary lives.
A glimpse of their friendship
This compilation brings together moments between Taylor and Selena from different years.
Watch:🎥 Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez Being Best Friends for 11 Minutes Straight
Not evidence of what happens privately between them, of course.
Just glimpses.
Sometimes that's all we get to see of someone else's friendship.
The Quiet Power of Work
What if success doesn't look the way we expected?
Five years ago, I left a steady teaching job at a high school and started working for myself.
It was one of the hardest decisions I've made.
My mother needed more care, and a traditional teaching schedule was making it increasingly difficult for me to be there for her. But there was another truth mixed in with that one: I wanted more control over my own time.
I had been teaching languages for years. I knew how to teach. What I didn't know was whether I could turn that experience into a business of my own.
There was no dramatic moment when I decided to change my life.
I was scared.
I worried about money. I wondered whether I was making a mistake. I missed some things about the classroom and didn't miss others at all.
But little by little, I built my language coaching business.
And something unexpected happened.
I realized that I liked working differently.
I liked choosing when I worked. I liked working directly with my students. I liked having time for my mother. And I liked discovering that leaving one kind of work didn't mean throwing away everything I'd spent years learning.
I was still a teacher.
I had simply changed the way I did it.
I've thought about that a lot since.
Maybe changing direction doesn't always mean starting again.
Sometimes we take what we already know and find a different place for it.
What Do We Mean by Success?
For a long time, I had a fairly conventional idea of what a successful working life looked like.
A stable job. A salary. Qualifications. Responsibilities. Progress.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things.
But they're not the whole story.
Work has to fit somewhere inside an actual life.
And actual lives contain children, aging parents, health, relationships, money, exhaustion, ambition, unexpected opportunities and changing priorities.
What works for us at thirty may not work at fifty.
What once felt secure can eventually feel restrictive. And something that would once have frightened us can begin to look surprisingly appealing.
That doesn't mean everyone should quit a job, start a business or “follow a dream.”
Sometimes staying is the right decision.
Sometimes we need the salary.
Sometimes the job we don't love makes possible a life we do.
And sometimes we genuinely like our work exactly as it is.
I think the more interesting question is simply:
Does the way I work still make sense for the life I have now?
The answer doesn't have to be no.
But it's worth asking.
Four Women Who Changed the Way They Worked
The women below didn't all reject conventional ideas of success. And they didn't make the same kinds of choices.
One left a corporate career and eventually returned to that world on different terms. One left teaching and discovered that her skills worked somewhere unexpected. One reached the top of a global company and then reconsidered what she wanted. One came to filmmaking later than we're accustomed to hearing in stories about successful directors.
That's what interests me.
There isn't one correct way to build a working life.
Louise Slyth
Leaving, Then Coming Back Differently
Louise Slyth had a successful corporate career in Edinburgh, but by her mid-thirties she was stressed and increasingly dissatisfied with the life surrounding it.
When voluntary redundancy gave her an opportunity to leave, she and her husband did something they had wanted to do for years: they moved to Barcelona.
For a year.
What I like about Louise's story is what happened afterward.
She didn't discover her “true calling” in Barcelona and abandon corporate life forever.
She came home.
And eventually she returned to communications, this time as a freelancer.
Same skills. Different arrangement.
I find that much more interesting than the familiar story about walking away from everything.
Sometimes we don't need an entirely new life.
We need to rearrange the one we have.
Read Louise's story at Business Insider.
Visit Louise Slyth's website: LouiseSlyth.com.
Maggie Perkins
Taking Her Skills Somewhere Else
Maggie Perkins taught for eight years before leaving education.
She was tired of the working conditions, the pay and the amount of unpaid work the job demanded.
Then she went to work at Costco.
On paper, that might have looked like an unusual career move for a teacher.
But Maggie eventually moved from membership services into corporate training and content development, where she creates training materials and helps employees learn.
In other words, she still teaches.
Just not in a school.
I like that.
We often talk about career changes as though we have to leave our old professional selves behind.
But skills travel.
Teaching is explaining, listening, organizing information, understanding how people learn, adapting when they don't understand, and trying again.
Those things don't belong exclusively in a classroom.
Sometimes the question isn't What else could I possibly do?
It's Where else could I do what I already know how to do?
Read Maggie's story at People: People.com.
Maureen Chiquet
After the Job at the Top
Maureen Chiquet built the kind of career we're accustomed to calling successful.
She worked at L'Oréal, helped launch Old Navy, led Banana Republic and eventually became global CEO of Chanel.
That's about as close to the traditional top of a career ladder as you can get.
Then, in 2016, she left Chanel after disagreements over the company's strategic direction.
What happened next interests me because there wasn't another bigger title waiting in the next paragraph.
She stopped.
She reconsidered what leadership and success meant to her and eventually wrote Beyond the Label: Women, Leadership, and Success on Our Own Terms.
There's something useful in her story for those of us who have spent years working toward something.
Reaching a goal doesn't oblige us to want it forever.
We're allowed to change after we arrive.
And one detail I particularly like: the portrait of Maureen you see here is a self-portrait. She paints too.
A person is always more than her job title.
Read more about Maureen Chiquet
Ava DuVernay
Starting Later Than Expected
Ava DuVernay didn't begin making films as a teenager with a camera in her hand.
She worked in film publicity first and directed her first feature in her thirties.
She didn't go to film school.
She started with what she had, financed early work herself and learned by doing.
She later became the first Black woman to direct a film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture with Selma.
I included Ava because we have some strange ideas about timing.
We like beginnings to happen young.
We like the twenty-two-year-old prodigy, the thirty-year-old founder, the person who apparently knew what she wanted to do from childhood.
Many of us don't.
Sometimes we find something late.
Sometimes what we did before turns out not to have been wasted time at all.
It was simply what came before.
Read Ava DuVernay's interview with The Guardian.
A Question to Carry With You
When I look at these four women, I don't see four examples of women who “chose themselves.”
Their decisions were more practical and complicated than that.
So was mine.
Leaving my teaching job wasn't simply about courage. My mother needed me. I needed flexibility. I had skills I thought I could use differently. And I was fortunate enough to have the possibility of trying.
That's important to acknowledge too.
Not everyone can leave a job that isn't working. Money matters. Family responsibilities matter. Health insurance, pensions, geography and opportunity matter.
So I wouldn't ask:
What would you do if nothing were holding you back?
Something is almost always holding us back.
I'd ask something more useful:
Does the way I work still fit the life I have now?
And if the answer is no:
What, realistically, could I change?
Maybe the answer is a new career.
Maybe it's fewer hours.
Maybe it's asking for something at work you've never asked for.
Maybe it's protecting one evening from work.
Maybe it's staying exactly where you are but changing what you expect your job to give you.
Or maybe you don't know yet.
That's fine too.
You can notice something isn't working before you know what to do about it.
The Myth of the “Late Bloomer”
WHY TIMING ISN’T THE POINT
I started writing books later in life.
For years, I taught languages. I loved it, and I still do. I lived in different countries, raised my children, built a marriage, worked, moved, started again more than once, and eventually came home to Italy.
Then my mother died.
Grief didn't suddenly turn me into a writer. I don't think it works that neatly.
But losing her did make me think differently about time.
I began asking questions I hadn't asked quite so seriously before.
How do I want to spend the years ahead of me?
What do I still want to do?
Writing kept appearing in the answers.
So I started.
Women Rising Strong came first. Then books. Then more writing. Eventually I found myself doing something I hadn't imagined as the next chapter of my life.
I don't think of myself as a late bloomer.
I'm not even sure I like the expression anymore.
A late bloomer compared with whom?
There seems to be an imaginary schedule we're supposed to follow. Decide who you are when you're young. Build the career. Establish yourself. Achieve the important things. And then, presumably, spend the rest of your life being the person you decided to become decades earlier.
But people don't work like that.
At least I don't.
I'm not the same woman I was at thirty. I don't want all the same things. I know things now that I couldn't have known then.
And some of what I want to do now requires the life I've already lived.
That's not lateness.
That's simply timing.
Who Decides What's Late?
We love stories about people who succeed young.
The child prodigy. The twenty-something entrepreneur. The writer with a first novel at twenty-five. The person who supposedly knew exactly what she wanted to do from the age of six.
Good for them.
But most lives aren't that tidy.
Sometimes we know what we want early.
Sometimes we discover it at forty-seven.
Sometimes we spend twenty years doing something we genuinely love and then want something else.
Sometimes necessity changes the plan.
Sometimes we begin something, abandon it and return years later.
And sometimes there is no grand reinvention at all. We simply become interested in something new.
I don't think any of those lives needs explaining.
The word late only makes sense if there was a deadline.
For most of the things that matter, I'm no longer convinced there is one.
Three Women Who Began Something Later
I don't want to use these women as proof that everyone can become famous at seventy.
That's not the point.
What interests me is simpler.
Something important in each of their lives happened later than we're accustomed to expecting.
And none of them needed permission from the calendar.
Ann Dowd — Working Before the World Noticed
Ann Dowd had been acting for decades before The Handmaid's Tale made her widely recognizable as Aunt Lydia.
She wasn't sitting around waiting to be discovered.
She was working.
She appeared in film, television and theatre, building a long career one role at a time. Then, in her sixties, a role arrived that brought a different level of attention and eventually an Emmy.
I think that's an important distinction.
We sometimes call someone a “late bloomer” when what we really mean is:
We noticed her late.
Her talent wasn't suddenly created when the award arrived.
The work was already there.
Mary Wesley — Beginning at Seventy
Mary Wesley's story fascinates me for a different reason.
She published her first novel for adults, Jumping the Queue, when she was seventy.
Seventy.
By then, she had already lived through war, marriage, motherhood, relationships, loss and all the complications of a long adult life.
Then she began a remarkably successful period as a novelist.
Her books weren't timid simply because their author was older. They dealt with sex, death, relationships and the untidiness of human behavior.
She went on writing well into her eighties.
What I like about Mary Wesley isn't the message that it's never too late.
It's that she apparently didn't require her age to mean very much at all.
She had something she wanted to write.
So she wrote it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder — The Life Before the Books
Laura Ingalls Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods in her sixties.
Before that came an entire life.
Childhood on the American frontier. Teaching. Marriage. Farming. Motherhood. Financial difficulty. Moving. Loss.
Much of that life eventually became the material for the books that made her famous.
That makes me think about the years we sometimes dismiss as the years before something important happens.
Maybe they aren't before.
Maybe they're simply part of it.
Not every experience has to become useful later. I don't believe everything happens for a reason.
But when I look at my own writing, I know that I couldn't have written some of what I'm writing now when I was twenty-five.
I hadn't lived it yet.
A Question to Carry With You
I used to like the question:
What would you do if you knew it wasn't too late?
Now I'm not sure it's the right question.
It still assumes there is such a thing as being late.
So perhaps I'd ask this instead:
Is there something I'm curious about now that I keep dismissing because of my age?
Not your calling.
Not your purpose.
Just something you're curious about.
Maybe you want to write.
Learn another language.
Study history.
Take piano lessons.
Change jobs.
Grow tomatoes.
Travel somewhere alone.
Go back to university.
Or perhaps there's nothing.
That's allowed too.
A meaningful life doesn't require constant reinvention.
I'm writing now because I want to write now.
Twenty years ago, I was doing something else.
That life mattered too.
When We’re the Ones Who Stay
On commitment, choice, and knowing what matters enough to remain
We hear a lot of stories about leaving.
Leaving the job. Leaving the marriage. Leaving the town where we grew up. Starting again somewhere else.
I understand why we tell those stories. Sometimes leaving takes enormous courage.
But lately I've been thinking about the other decision.
Staying.
Not staying because we're afraid to leave.
Not staying because someone tells us we have to.
And certainly not staying somewhere that is hurting or diminishing us.
I mean the times when we look at something difficult, complicated or imperfect and decide:
This still matters to me. I'm staying.
I know something about that kind of choice.
When my mother became ill with cancer, I was living abroad. My work was there. My friends were there. I had built a life elsewhere.
Then I had the opportunity to come home to Italy.
I didn't experience it as some great act of sacrifice.
She was my mother.
She needed care, and I wanted to be here.
So I came home.
That doesn't mean it was easy.
Watching someone you love become ill is awful. There were things I couldn't fix and days I couldn't make better. Being physically present didn't protect either of us from what was happening.
But it gave us time.
And now that she's gone, I'm profoundly grateful for that.
I wasn't alone, either. My three sisters were here. We each carried different things, sometimes well and sometimes probably not. We were daughters watching our mother die. There was nothing inspirational about that.
We simply stayed with her.
I've thought about that word ever since.
Stay.
It's such an ordinary word.
But sometimes it contains an entire decision.
Staying Isn't Always the Brave Choice
I want to be careful here.
I don't believe women deserve praise simply for staying.
Women have been told to stay for centuries.
Stay in the marriage. Endure. Be patient. Keep the family together. Don't complain. Put everyone else first.
Sometimes the bravest and healthiest thing a woman can do is leave.
So this isn't an argument for staying.
It's an argument for choice.
There are also times when staying is exactly what we want to do.
We stay with a person through a difficult period because the relationship still matters to us.
We stay in a place because we've made a home there.
We stay with work that isn't glamorous because it supports the life we want.
We stay beside someone who is ill.
We stay committed to an idea when progress is painfully slow.
We keep tending a garden, a friendship, a marriage, a skill, a community, a piece of work.
Not everything difficult needs to be escaped.
And not everything worth keeping is easy.
I'm increasingly suspicious of simple rules about either one.
Leave. Stay. Begin again. Hold on.
The right answer depends on the life.
Four Different Ways of Staying
These four women don't really belong together in any obvious way.
An architect. A novelist. A writer confronting incurable illness. A Catholic nun opposing the death penalty.
But each made me think about staying differently.
Not staying still.
Staying with something.
Aziza Chaouni — Staying Connected to a Place
Architect Aziza Chaouni grew up in Fez, Morocco, and later returned her attention to a place she knew well: the city's historic medina and the Fez River running through it.
The river had become heavily polluted and, in places, covered over.
Her work on its rehabilitation brought together architecture, infrastructure, public space and environmental restoration.
What interests me about her story is the relationship between leaving a place and belonging to it.
We sometimes imagine that moving away means severing the connection.
It doesn't have to.
You can leave home, learn elsewhere, become someone different—and still care deeply about what happens to the place that formed you.
I understand that.
Sometimes returning doesn't mean going backwards.
You simply come back as someone who has more to bring with her.
Marilynne Robinson — Staying With the Questions
Marilynne Robinson's novels return again and again to some decidedly unfashionable subjects.
Faith. Family. Home. Loneliness. Forgiveness. Ordinary lives. What people owe one another.
Her characters don't always stay, and staying isn't always presented as virtuous. That's partly why I find her work interesting.
She doesn't make ordinary life simple.
She looks at it closely.
In a culture that constantly wants something new, there is something compelling about a writer spending decades returning to questions she still hasn't exhausted.
Perhaps that's another kind of staying.
Not refusing to change your mind.
Just recognizing that some questions are worth asking more than once.
Kate Bowler — Staying With What Is True
Kate Bowler was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at thirty-five.
She was a scholar of the prosperity gospel—a version of Christianity often associated with the idea that the right faith and attitude can lead to health and success—and suddenly found herself living inside a reality that refused any neat explanation.
What I value in her work is her unwillingness to make suffering behave.
She writes about illness, uncertainty, love, faith and fear without rushing toward the silver lining.
She doesn't tell us everything happens for a reason.
She doesn't turn pain into a lesson simply because lessons make pain easier to package.
Sometimes terrible things happen.
And sometimes there is beauty at the same time.
Both can be true.
That kind of honesty feels like staying too: not looking away from the life that's actually happening because we'd prefer a more comforting version of it.
Sister Helen Prejean — Staying and Disagreeing
Sister Helen Prejean is a Catholic nun who has spent decades campaigning against the death penalty.
Her activism brought her into relationships with people on death row, victims' families, prison officials and a criminal justice system she came to believe needed profound change.
She also remained a Catholic nun.
I find that tension interesting.
We often imagine disagreement as a reason to walk away from an institution, community or tradition.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes people remain precisely because they care enough to challenge something from within.
Staying doesn't necessarily mean accepting everything.
Loyalty doesn't require silence.
Sometimes staying gives us a place from which to speak.
A Question to Carry With You
I don't think the question is:
Am I brave enough to stay?
And I don't think it's:
Am I brave enough to leave?
Maybe it's simply:
What am I choosing to stay with—and why?
A person.
A place.
A friendship.
A piece of work.
An idea.
A responsibility.
A version of yourself.
Some answers may make you think, Yes. This still matters.
Others may be more uncomfortable.
That's probably worth noticing too.
