Ep 79: Friendship, Regret and the Joy of Breaking the Rules: Mikki Brammer on Good Joy, Bad Joy

To, you know, what is a smooth segue back to the book, these two characters, Joy and Hazel, are great friends, I think.

I really love to hear about their friendship.

And I think I made a note that it was like 80 years of friendship at the point of

this novel, right?

Yes.

What did you want to kind of highlight or, you know, maybe it's better to start more broad because it's a book about that friendship but also it runs through the impact of our experience of our parents into how we parent our own kids and also relationships and the role that friends can have in our relationships with partners and with children.

There's so much in there.

What did you hope to, or how would you describe the book if someone asked you what's it about?

Yeah, I would say it's an ode to lifelong friendships, very late bloomers and the thrill that comes with dabbling in a little bit of mischief.

That's generally like my one-line pitch.

But I was really interested in all those things that you mentioned, exploring those themes.

And I... realized that there hadn't been that i'd read too many uh books written about the great romance of platonic love um and especially of that length 80 years or i think it's even 81 years and I had the idea when I was back in Tassie a few years ago and I was at my mum's house and my great aunt Hilda was there and she was about 88 at the time and it was me, her, my mum and my cousin and we were having lunch and Auntie Hilda really loved going to the movies and she asked if one of us would see it with her, see a certain movie with her.

I think it was like Knives Out.

And we'd already seen it.

And I said, well, why don't you just go with one of your friends? And she said, all my friends are dead.

And she said it in kind of a joking way.

But there was also, you know, that pang of truth to it.

And it really made me think, wow, what does what is that like when, you know, in a world where we're so focused on doing everything we can to live as long as we can? But what happens when you do actually outlive everybody and you have to watch your social circle and your family be slowly whittled away until you are that last one left? your contemporaries at least obviously there'll be younger people still around but it must be such a hard thing to do you know I've lost two friends young and it's really hard so I can't imagine what it's like to get to that point where you're losing a friend pretty much every week which was what was happening to her at that time I think she's just always going to funerals and I think we also tend to write off the elders in western society in particular we kind of write off our elders, you know, aren't they cute or, you know, they're tucked away in the nursing home or just doing these funny antics that we don't really take seriously.

But I think when you've had a, it hurts when you've got a, when you've had a friend that you've lost and you've been friends for 10 years.

So multiply that by eight, what is that like? And so I really wanted to explore that while also exploring how that great romance works.

in the platonic sense took place across those decades and these two women who have grown um together and apart and challenged each other supported each other and the thing is unless you meet your romantic partner very young often your friendships out that some of them are the longest relationship outside of family that you ever have in your life and i wanted to emphasize that and explore and celebrate that

yeah now that you explain it like that it makes me think see it um i mean i could feel it in the book and but it really was like losing a great love or the love of her life um the same as like a significant other really and so the it it's interesting how we might see it differently if we look at it through that lens the loss of a significant other versus the loss of a friend um I mean, not to say that it's less, but I guess that's what I mean, that we never really consider how big of a role it is in our lives.

Right.

So what did you say at the beginning? You said something about the...

like long-lasting friendship yeah very late bloomers that's right yeah and then the mischief yeah