If you want to know what Ann looked like as a teenager, picture the classic ’90s cartoon Daria, but way more physically awkward at a gangly six feet two inches tall. Her parents did not approve of her self-selected thrift-store wardrobe, so she would smuggle her destroyed vintage corduroys, which met the dress-code requirements on a technicality, and then change in the bathroom at school. Her best friend Bridget, whom she had met in junior-high math class, lived next door to their high school but would drive all the way to Ann’s house to pick her up in the morning, usually blasting Prince from her two-tone beige Nissan. Like Ann, Bridget had no interest in school sports or religion, and they started an extremely premature countdown to graduation. They spent hours in Bridget’s basement, sipping LaCroix while watching old Hitchcock movies and reruns of Absolutely Fabulous. If she wasn’t at Bridget’s, Ann was with her other bestie Josh. They worked on the school newspaper together and could reliably be found special-ordering CDs at the local music store, or at a strip-mall coffee shop reading the New York Times, sipping sugary lattes and making plans for when they’d leave their suffocating town and life would truly begin. Both of these friendships are still going strong, perhaps because they always felt rooted in the future as much as in the present.
Maybe it was all that reading. Or maybe it was because social-justice Catholics were the only role models from Ann’s religious education that she actually respected. (Shout out to Óscar Romero and Dorothy Day.) But however it happened, Ann developed a social conscience pretty early. As a teen, she ran her school chapter of Amnesty International, meaning she’d get to school early to write letters on behalf of political prisoners in Russia and Chad. She planned an annual benefit concert called, regrettably, Jamnesty, and she was once the sole person at the death-penalty protest that she herself had organized. She desperately wanted to be someone who was involved in the world beyond their hometown.
The day Ann’s parents dropped her off at college remains among the happiest of her life. She was finally free to begin writing her own story, far from the confines of her upbringing. She had always wanted to be a writer, so she had picked the University of Missouri for its undergraduate journalism program. She was definitely not the only person at the death-penalty protest anymore. And, like her, everyone was eager to write for the campus newspapers (yes, there were multiple) and primed to eventually compete for an impossibly tiny number of entry-level reporting jobs. Suddenly, Ann was the norm.
She befriended a couple of photojournalism students, Lara and Gracy, who lived in her cinder-block dorm and shared her taste in music and movies. Once a week, they indulged in an off-campus dinner at the local vegetarian restaurant Main Squeeze. The following year, these women became Ann’s first chosen roommates, and together they experienced the joys and frustrations of cohabitation. They threw a raucous cocktail party where someone did an accidental backflip over the banister (she lived to tell the tale) and let touring indie-rock bands crash on their floor and lumpy couch—which was later incinerated after Gracy’s boyfriend fell asleep on it with a lit cigarette. Their bonds were forged by countless late-night conversations in the house’s weird upstairs kitchen, over reheated burritos and ramen noodles. Ann reveled in the feeling that they had selected each other out of thousands of people on campus.
In her senior year, Ann was recruited to join a fundraiser to send several busloads of Missouri feminists to a protest march against the Bush administration in DC. It was these women who showed Ann by example what it looks like to call yourself a feminist. Thanks to them, she finally read the iconic writer bell hooks! These friendships felt deep from the start because they were underpinned by shared values. And even if Ann was extremely stressed out about how she would make a career as an “objective” journalist who was also an impassioned feminist, she was also grateful to these new friends for introducing the complication.
Stories like these didn’t just fill Aminatou in on where Ann was coming from. As Aminatou listened, she sensed the expansive possibilities of this budding friendship. She was intrigued that she could share so much emotional and cultural DNA with someone she had just met. Aminatou loved that Ann was never judgmental and incredibly independent-minded. She was not shy about expressing her needs and wants, and she set clear expectations about her place in the world. This made Aminatou feel that she could prioritize herself as well.
We hung on to each other’s every word. But we didn’t realize that we were doing more than telling the stories of ourselves. We were starting to tell a joint story about who we were together.
* * *
For all the obvious differences between us, it was hard not to notice how similar we were.
We grew up thousands of miles apart, but we were both from relatively conservative cultures where the first questions of young women were often “What’s your dad’s name? What does he do?” We had both always wanted life to take us far from home. We were usually reading between one and three different books at any given time. We were accustomed to people making rude comments about our height and weight, respectively. And even though we complained about how hard it was to find cute clothes that fit, or confessed how awkward we sometimes felt in our own skin, it was always clear that we didn’t hate our bodies. We weren’t trying to change them. We shared a desire to be women who take up a lot of space and refuse to apologize for it. We loved eating in restaurants alone, preferably at the bar. Our hearts soared every time we discovered something we had in common. Where has she been my whole life? we thought. How am I so lucky to have found this person?
We were creating our “story of sameness,” as the linguist Deborah Tannen calls it. In her book You’re the Only One I Can Tell, she notes that people who were socialized as women tend to pepper their conversations with phrases like “The same thing happened to me” and “I know, I feel the same way.” Sometimes, Tannen observes, this process can be subtly competitive—a way of one-upping each other or minimizing the other person’s experience by quickly saying you’ve done that too. But it doesn’t have to be, and we can honestly say we never felt anything but admiration and curiosity in those early days.
We felt so lucky to have found someone on our exact wavelength. What we didn’t realize was that we were actually creating the wavelength. Our ideas about showing emotion, relating to other friends, expressing vulnerabilities, and handling conflict were forming in relation to each other. We were both adept at hiding our insecurities and quick to dismiss or downplay them with a joke or snarky comment. Acquaintances and casual friends tended to view us both as “strong” people who had our shit together. It was possible for us to crack our hard shells open and expose some soft underbelly to each other because we could share a knowing laugh about how weird it was for both of us. And we were self-described “low-drama mamas”—a term our friend group used for women who avoided gossiping about and picking fights with other women. It was a way of distancing ourselves from the stereotype that women are all dramatic and eager to make a big deal out of nothing. Our joint story was that together we were fierce about our ideals but also easygoing. We strived to be your favorite lady’s favorite ladies. We weren’t just spending a lot of time together and recognizing our points of sameness. We were amplifying and doubling down on them.