Most episodes about friendship arrive as advice: five signs it’s time to let a relationship go, three tips for staying close in your thirties. Culture Study‘s episode on intergenerational friendships skips the listicle entirely and spends fifty minutes making a case instead: these relationships are not a nice extra, they are structural.
Anne Helen Petersen’s guest is Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner behind Less, on to talk about his new novel Villa Coco. Greer calls it a “charm novel”, something distinct from a comfort read. Terrible things can happen in it, he says, but there is a sense of possibility and eccentricity running underneath that lets you laugh at things a little rather than sit in the wreckage.
The real friendship behind the novel is the best part of the conversation. In 2005, Greer was invited to a writers’ residency in rural Tuscany run by a baronessa then in her late seventies. Twenty years on, they are still close. He was the only person besides her nephew at her ninetieth birthday in Havana. She turned a hundred a few months ago, and he saw her again a few weeks earlier for a long lunch. He calls it one of the greatest friendships of his life, and says so without any of the awkwardness people sometimes bring to admitting an older friend matters this much.
Petersen pushes back on the tidy version of this story too, the one where an older relative simply moves into the spare room and gets looked after. Her point: grandma is also a social person with her own friends, of all ages. Greer’s family offers a real example rather than a hypothetical: his wife’s uncle, ninety six, comes for lunch every weekend and is cared for in small ways, and he is also out dancing and drinking until eleven or midnight. Care runs in both directions, and it does not cancel out the fact that he is still, by every account, out living his life.
Then the conversation turns structural, which is where it earns its keep. Why is this so much rarer in North America? Part of it, Petersen argues, is geography and mobility: college educated people in the US tend to move further from home for work, while in Italy, even someone who leaves their hometown usually finds it easier to get back. Greer adds an economic layer: low salaries in Italy often mean young adults cannot afford a place of their own until a family apartment frees up, so proximity to older relatives is sometimes less a choice than a condition of affording rent at all. In the US, the closest thing to that tether is health insurance tied to employment. He notes that China, despite being enormous, still manages the same closeness, which quietly undercuts the idea that country size explains any of it.
The lightest moment comes when Petersen explains why she keeps younger friends around: she has retired from the job of knowing what is cool, and would rather have a twenty year old show her. She does not mind looking undignified doing it. Show me the new dance, she says, and let me be bad at it. Greer laughs and adds his own version of the same shift: he is no longer anyone’s young friend. He is friend to a woman who just turned a hundred.
It sent me straight back to Kim.
We met in the gown room in my second year at Mount Allison University, of all places, and neither of us was in an obvious spot to become someone’s closest friend for the next two decades. She was in the middle of a divorce. I was a university student a year or two from moving away for grad school, with no real sense yet of what my life would look like. Kim came to visit me in London more than once, and those visits turned into some of my favourite kind of trip: wandering a city I was still getting to know myself, alongside someone doing the same thing from a completely different vantage point. We still text daily, sometimes nothing more than a meme or a song pulled off Spotify with no explanation attached. She stood as witness at my wedding.
What I keep coming back to is how much I have gotten from friendships with women older than me, and how little of it came from proximity the way Greer describes in Italy. We built this on purpose, across a country and then an ocean. Kim arrived with a kind of perspective that only comes from having lived through more of it: a career and a marriage and then a different one, decisions made in circumstances that were, by any honest measure, harder than the ones facing me now. The generational gaps show up in small, funny ways, mostly around technology, and those gaps are part of what makes the friendship interesting rather than a problem to smooth over.
Petersen’s line stays with me: grandma is also a social person with friends of her own. Kim was never a role to me, a wise older figure dispensing lessons from a fixed point above. She was, and is, just as unfinished and figuring it out as I was in that gown room. Greer got twenty years and a novel out of his friendship with a baronessa in Tuscany. I got a decade of memes, a wedding witness, and a friend who has watched me become an adult from the closest possible distance. Neither of us had a household or a healthcare system keeping us close. We just kept choosing it.