'You're actually in your forties now...'

That weird fleeting feeling of recognition

A still from the movie Friends With Money

I found myself watching Friends With Money again this afternoon (can you believe it first came out in 2006?) for no particular reason other than it’s Friday, I had admin to do, and it was such a boring prospect I figured I’d do it with something on in the background. I think, from memory, I must have seen this film a couple of years after it came out, back in the day when you had to order a DVD through the post and plan your evenings in that way, though I’m not sure that twenty-four-year-old me would have really appreciated the nuances of the mid-life friendships it focuses on.

If you’ve not seen Friends With Money, it’s about a group of four women, three of them married, one of them not. They are all vaguely in their early forties; the opening scene is of them all out for dinner at a restaurant for one of the women’s forty-third birthday. Though we’re not told how the women are friends, the implication is that they’ve known each other for decades and since they were young. The movie is, like most Nicole Holofcener films, mostly gentle about everyday lives with a little wit and sarcasm thrown in. I mean, nothing major happens. It’s the kind of film you can have on in the background whilst planning your to-do list and filling in consent forms for school, which is what I was actually doing whilst watching it. I mean this in the kindest possible way- it’s sweet and not very dramatic and about mostly ordinary people which is what I actually love about NH’s films. Sometimes you just want something predominantly uncomplicated, as this predominantly is. Anyway, the film focuses on each of the marriages and also, as the title would suggest, on the group’s friendships and dynamics, and how that’s changed with jobs and money. Each of the couples are going through their own things and speculate within the privacy of their individual marriages about their friends’ lives and how they throw their money away. They all agree that their single friend (played by Jennifer Aniston) is reckless because she had an affair with a married man, quit her job as a teacher and is now working as a maid. Here’s the trailer.

So far, so simple. There’s this one part in the film where one of the women is lying in bed and turns away from her husband; this particular friend is going through some kind of perimenopause mid-life crisis although it’s never actually identified as such and I doubt that the word perimenopause was used as much in 2006 as it is now. Anyway, she’s tired all the time and often angry, gets overwhelmed and shouts at strangers in an Old Navy store. In this scene, she’s lying in bed and she says to her husband - 'I don’t feel like myself.’

And he says something like, ‘I think this birthday was really hard for you.’ She tries to laugh it off, like 43, no big deal to the year before, and he says, in an offering-kindness-sort-of-way, ‘Yeah, but it is, you’re actually in your forties now.’

Later, she’s arguing with her husband in the car and he asks her why she’s being difficult when she says, as if to herself, ‘There’s no more wondering what it’s going to be like.’ Still annoyed at her, he asks her what on earth she’s talking about. And then she says, uncharacteristically quietly, ‘My fabulous life.’

Now up until this point, I was just half-watching the film whilst inputting my children’s various school trips into my calendar and flicking through a document I’d be sent to review. But when she said this; oh! It sure caught me by the throat. I looked up and it kind of stung. Not because I feel the same, I have to say, but because I know I have done in the past, even if for just a moment. One of those fleeting moments when everything feels a little too much, when you look around and remember all the things you thought you’d have achieved or have done by the time you got to this point and then you realise, kind of sadly and momentarily self-pityingly - but is this it? And I don’t mean that because I genuinely believe it - I am aware of all my good fortune and family and home and love and I wouldn’t change much for the world except I’d… really like to write another book, I guess. But just watching this little exchange play out briefly on the television, hearing that character’s small voice, it made me feel, I don’t know, a kindness to the version of myself that I’ve been so hard on in the past.

Anyway. The moment came and went, as they always do. But it moved me and it reminded me, in a strange roundabout kind of way, that this is what movies and books and art are for; a plot might be forgettable, but there might just be a sentence that stays with you for longer than you realise. And maybe that’s the point of it all. Just a tiny detail that sticks.

Have you ever felt that too? Leaving you with that this weekend.

Oh, and sorry I’ve not written for a couple of weeks - it’s been busy, busy - but I’ve been so grateful for the extra paid subscribers who have come along even when I’ve not written anything. You pushed me to put words on the page today and that can only be a good thing.

With love,

Huma x