Over the past couple of years, when people asked me what I was working on I’d say, “It’s a novel about long-term female friendships. Really, it’s about a friend breakup.” That’s when they’d stop just being polite and actually look at me.
“Have you ever had a friend breakup?” I’d ask, and it all came out.
Strangers at parties, casual acquaintances, people I’d known for years, everyone wanted to tell me how their heart was broken. Most often they said that they hadn’t known anything was wrong until they received a text or a letter saying the friendship was over—then nothing. They were ghosted. No response to requests to talk. They didn’t know how they had screwed up, but if they had, wasn’t this the person they had always trusted to tell them? More honest than family, more loyal than lovers. Now they were gone. Done.
(This childhood friend and I are still together. We call this our “Mick and Keith” photo)
When the rest of your life implodes, your friends are the ones who don’t, right? People told me how badly they had been treated and still wanted to beg forgiveness if their friend would only pick up the phone. They had seen each other through schools, jobs, parents, failure, success, love affairs, marriages, crazy siblings, politics (Politics!), and the time they went on that road trip. This was the person they called when it really mattered. Mostly, people wanted to talk and I wanted to listen. It made me feel a little better about my own friend breakup. The one that happened almost twenty years ago. We haven’t spoken since and it still bewilders me so much I wrote a whole book about it. (Talking to the Wolf, Red Hen Press, Spring 2026).
So here is an invitation:
If you want to tell me about your friend breakup, I will read what you send me. I’ll summarize your story, change your name, and any other names you might mention, and write my response in this Substack so that we’ll all feel a little less lonely. If you can’t speak to that friend anymore, we can keep each other company, even if you never understand what happened. Share your story by clicking on the link below.
About Rebecca Chace
Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of Leaving Rock Harbor (novel); Capture the Flag (novel); Chautauqua Summer (memoir); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle readers). Her fifth book, Talking to the Wolf (novel), is forthcoming from Red Hen Press (2026).
She has written for the New York Times, NYT Magazine, NYT Sunday Book Review, The New England Review of Books, The Yale Review, The LA Review of Books, Lit Hub, Guernica, and many other publications. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies including Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo; Dora Maar House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the American Academy in Rome (visiting artist) and others. She is a Faculty Associate at the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking.
Rebecca Chace’s play Obit was runner-up in the 2025 Tennessee Williams Festival One-Act Play Contest and had a staged reading at NYU/Tisch’s Studio Tisch Festival (2023). Her multi-media piece Beka, 14 was developed during a fellowship at Catwalk Artist Residency (2024). Other plays include Colette (Theatre for the New City, NYC) and The Awakening (adapted from Kate Chopin’s novel, premiered at Book-It Repertory/Seattle Rep). She also adapted her novel Capture the Flag into a short film with director Lisanne Skyler, winning the Showtime Tony Cox Screenwriting Award at the Nantucket Film Festival.
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