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Nina Badzin

Book Club With The HerStories Project

Earlier this week, our contributor Nina Badzin shared her experiences with finding the perfect book club. As her post states, friendships and book clubs don’t always mix. Just because you enjoy the company of certain friends, neighbors, and co-workers doesn’t mean you’d necessarily click as a book club. The dynamics of a perfect book club have always reminded me of finding the right partner: sure, you may enjoy the same movies or share important values, but do you want the same things out of your relationship?

The first book club I ever joined at the ripe old age of 22 made me feel terribly grown-up- I mean, I was in a book club! Wasn’t that what real adults did? Getting together with other intelligent adults to passionately and astutely dissect literature sounded right up my alley. After I forced myself to endure the torture of Kafka’s The Trial, I decided to spice things up with a new, out-of-the-box (heh heh) book about feminism. I chose a somewhat controversially titled book by Inga Muscio. To my great surprise and outrage, both the men and the women in the group tore my selection to shreds. The verbal evisceration continued outside the monthly meeting, extending into strongly-worded email exchanges. That was it. I was out.

My most recent book club fell into the all-too-common trap that Nina alluded to: a bunch of women sitting around talking about their jobs and families and spending perhaps three total minutes talking about the book. Half of the group never read the book, and we too did that awkward dance where we tried to discuss the ending without ruining it for the slackers. “You know… when Martha has her transformation?” we would ask pointedly, raising our eyebrows at fellow book-finishers. “Ohhh, right. I agree- that part was very…pivotal.” Not much of a discussion.

Even when I’m reading a book by myself, I frequently read through the Discussion Questions at the end. For one, if the book was engaging, I’m often in withdrawal already and am anxious to soak up just a few more pages before saying goodbye and moving on my next selection, which I’m already convinced could never measure up to its predecessor. I also enjoy taking a few minutes to process some of the nuances of the characters or plot, and maybe even apply the storyline to my own life.

Not surprisingly, we think The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship would make the perfect book club book! We love how the book has inspired women to reflect on their own life experiences and friendships, and what better environment to dig deeper into the power of friendship than a (harmonious, dysfunction-free) book club?

So to help you avoid falling into the traps I mentioned:
a) The unfocused rant conversation
b) The vague, unpleasantly brief, lacks direction discussion

We’ve come up with some book club discussion questions that we invite you to use when discussing The HerStories Project with your book club! We will give them a permanent home in the menu of our website, but here they are!
1. Which stories resonated with you the most? Why? Did they remind you of yourself, or of a particular friendship or time in your life?
2. How long have you known your closest friends? Do you have any of the same friends you’ve had since childhood, high school, or college? When did you meet your current friends?
3. When you think of your current friendships, how did you meet? Why did you decide to become close friends?
4. Which qualities are most important to you in a friend? What important qualities do you bring to your friendships?
5. If you are a mother, did you make any new friendships during your transition to motherhood? What did these relationships do for you? If you are not a mother, were there important transitions in your life– graduation, move to a new city, a new job, marriage– that brought new friends into your life? Why do you think we tend to form new friendships during these stages of extreme change and flux?
6. Have you ever had a friendship breakup? Did you initiate it, or did your friend “break up” with you? How did you feel about it? Were you sad or relieved? Do you still miss your friend?
7. Are there friends who are no longer in your life that you wish you could reconnect with? What would happen if you did, and what reasons would compel you to try again or keep your distance?
8. Have you ever mourned the loss of a friend? What helped get you through it?
9. How are your friendships similar to romantic relationships? How are they different? Are you more or less emotionally intimate with your girlfriends than you are with your partner?
10. How often do you need to spend time with your friends to feel happy and balanced? What obstacles do you face that prevent you from staying in touch with your friends? How can you stay more connected and still make time for yourself, your family, and your job?
If you haven’t bought your copy of the book yet, you can order one right here, and send your fellow book club members over, too! In the spirit of friendship, consider buying The HerStories Project for a friend for February 14th: International Book Giving Day. We think it is a great tribute to the importance of female friendship in a woman’s life.

Happy Reading!

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When Friendships and Book Clubs Do Not Mix

This week we’re thrilled to publish a guest post by HerStories Project contributor Nina Badzin. Lots of women are enthusiastic members of their book clubs, but it’s also true that not every woman is looking for the same thing when she joins one. Have you ever been a “mismatch” with a book club that you’ve joined? Read Nina’s experience with trying to combine friendship and book clubs:

I always wanted to be part of a book club.

My initial desire started young when I observed my mom’s enthusiastic participation in one. However, I didn’t realize as a kid that my mom and her fellow book club members were brought together through a shared love of reading and nothing more. They were certainly very friendly on account of the book club, but they didn’t create the book club because they were close friends. The difference is significant, which took several failed book clubs for me to understand.

I started my first book club in the summer of 2000. I was twenty-three and had recently moved to Minneapolis where I knew my husband’s (then fiance’s) family and not another soul. In my fantasy of young almost-married life, I had to be part of a book club. Aside from the model of my mom’s club, I also had Oprah. The summer of 2000 was the heyday of Oprah’s book club. People were reading the same books all over the country, discussing them in cozy groups while sipping wine in well-designed living rooms. I wanted in! More than anything though, I wanted to make friends.

I created a book club as soon as I’d made two friends, and they invited others they knew. I remember not liking some of the novels we chose, but like my mother, I always finished so I could participate. My frustration when others didn’t finish or when we didn’t really discuss the book was palpable. Let’s just say I wasn’t the most popular woman in the group and instead of making new friends, I made people mad. Eventually I quit, which made me look like a snob (according to the unsolicited feedback that came back to me later). The experience was a disaster both from a book lover’s point of view, and as someone trying to make new friends in a new city.

I tried another group with some different friends the next year, but the same thing happened. We’d rarely discuss the book because not everyone had read it. Now before you think I’m completely anti-social, let me say that I do love hearing about everyone’s lives, catching up, and simply hanging out. But I longed for a book club where the women wanted to talk about the books. I mean really discuss them–like speaking over each other and having to eventually cut off the conversation when it gets too late kind of discussing. I was also a ninth grade English teacher then, which meant I already spent time forcing a discussion about a book as a job. I didn’t want to do that in my free time too!

Fast forward a few years. A friend of mine invited me into a book club with some women she’d known in high school. This book club didn’t work out for me either because those of us who read the book weren’t supposed to “ruin” the ending for the others. When I accidentally broke that rule, the group’s unofficial leader sent a scathing email to the entire group reminding us how “unfair” it was to spoil the ending. Any book lover will understand why I left that group immediately. I also realized that I didn’t want to be in a book club with a group of old friends–my friends or anyone’s.

Since then I’d been invited into other groups, but I’d always decline. In a smaller community like Minneapolis, I didn’t think I could afford to make any more bad impressions with people based on my desires to discuss the dang book.

However, two neighbors I was friendly with insisted many times that I try the neighborhood club. They promised that everyone in the group was an enthusiastic participator. And they were right! I’ve been in that group for two years now, and I finally found the club where I belong. The women range in age from 35 to 65, which helps keep conversation from lingering too long on subjects like potty training or even college visits. We are all at different points in our lives and come from a variety of backgrounds, but what we all have in common in any particular month is the book we read. Our differences bring layers to the discussion and bring up issues from the book that hadn’t occurred to me on my own.

As for friendship, of course after two years we’ve developed a friendliness above and beyond “fellow book club member.” I was incredibly touched when some of the women from the group carpooled to see me in the Listen to Your Mother show last year. And when an interesting author comes to town we have tried to make an outing of that, too. We’ve arranged for author visits as well either in person or via Skype. I must say it’s the perfect book club (for me) made even more wonderful by each host living no more than five minutes from my house. Luckily this book club saga had a happy ending!

Have you been able to create a successful book club with close friends or has your experience been more like mine?

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The Case For A Friendship Break

We are so excited to have writer and blogger Nina Badzin with us on HerStories today. I first became acquainted with Nina’s writing when I was desperately trying as a new blogger to make sense of Twitter. Within 15 minutes of reading about how to use Twitter with Nina’s guidance, social media etiquette started to make more sense. Then I started reading some of her parenting articles and essays, such as her Huffington Post piece that was part of the This Is Childhood series. Soon I was in awe of her literary skills and reached out to her on Twitter, and I quickly learned that Nina is as generous in spirit and time to her writing peers, as she is in her essays.

-Jessica

We’re delighted to learn more about the potential value of “friendship breaks” from Nina:

The Case For A Friendship Break
by Nina Badzin

Some former friends (okay, most former ones) are best left in the past. But sometimes an old friend can haunt you. She’s the friend that got away. She’s the one that’s worth getting back.

I met Becky in August 1995 on the day we moved a few rooms apart in the same freshman dorm. I can still envision her standing at my door introducing herself. “I was born in Highland Park!” she said, referring to the cutesy door signs our resident advisors made about our hometowns.

Speaking more quickly than I did, which I had never thought possible, Becky explained that her parents moved her family from Highland Park (in Chicago) to Maryland. We marveled at the idea that we could have grown up together. That plus our instant chemistry lent a certain inevitability to our bond.

We claimed each other in that unspoken way that girls (and women) do when they become close quickly. We went to every party together. Ate every meal together. Obsessed about boyfriends together. We were each other’s home base in those first months, then years, away from home.

Our rift didn’t happen with a fight over a guy or something easy to name. An “incident” to reference would have been a comfort. No, instead our growing apart felt like a deep judgement on the people we were each trying to become.

It began slowly while Becky was abroad for a semester in Jerusalem and I was in Santiago. We came back for our senior year in different mindsets. I decided not to take the LSAT. I dropped my senior thesis (that I had spent eight months researching in Santiago). Within the first few months of our senior year, I met Bryan, whom I would end up marrying exactly two years later so you can imagine that he had become a big focus of my time.

Becky had a serious boyfriend too, but she was going through her own strange year. We bickered a lot, doing a poor job of letting the other one grow and change. Becky would admit that she was harder on me than necessary that year. I can admit that I was a party-pooper to put it mildly.

After college our long distance friendship felt forced, but since I didn’t know how to let things drift to a natural end, I did something a bit dramatic. Essentially, I told Becky that I didn’t think we should stay friends. My “wish” came true. We were not in each other’s lives during my engagement or when I got married. I’ve been married for twelve years and I still can’t believe Becky wasn’t there. It doesn’t seem possible considering how close we are now.

Author Julie Klam writes in her memoir Friendkeeping, “There is something to be said for having ‘breaks’ in friendships. Sometimes you find there are things you need to do in your life and a certain friend may not support that change, at that moment anyway. It is very fair to allow people to grow and change, but it’s nice to be able to come back home again, too.”

After about two years, I missed Becky terribly. As Julie Klam put so well, I wanted to “come back home.” I took a chance that she felt the same way and sent her a handwritten letter explaining how much our friendship had meant to me. I asked her to forgive me for not seeing a different way to handle my need for time apart years earlier.

Becky never wrote me back. I had set the terms for our break and now she had the right to determine if and when we would reconcile.

I think a year passed with no word from Becky, but when two of our mutual close friends had weddings planned for the same summer, there was no avoiding each other. During the first of those weekends we hugged (awkwardly) and decided to go for walk. By the end of that walk, our break was over. Becky addressed some of what I had written in the letter, but we honestly didn’t harp on the past too much. We agreed, (with ridiculous amounts of maturity!) that however difficult and hurtful our “break” had been, it had served its purpose. We had ended up with time to grow into ourselves in ways that were hard for the other one to understand and therefore support.

Our original chemistry was back in full force and we found that we led similar lives with similar values. Bryan and I attended her wedding the next year. Our firstborn children (eight years old now) were born only months apart. We’re now both moms of four and we’ve been there for each other (emotionally though not physically) after the births of each child in those first ugly months when everything makes you cry. We can go two months without talking then speak every day for a week as we try to get to the end of one simple story.

I feel Becky’s college influence on my life even now. I had always admired how analytical Becky was, how bright, how proud of her Judaism. That I send my kids to a Jewish parochial school is directly connected to Becky. I wanted my children, like Becky, to move confidently and intelligently around all the details of our religion and culture from the ins and outs of the Hebrew language to a deep knowledge and understanding of why we do what we do.

If that was all Becky had given me it would have been enough. But she gave me so much more. She gave our friendship a second chance. For that and so much more she has my deepest respect, gratitude and love.

Nina Badzin is a writer living in Minneapolis with her husband and four children. Her essays on parenting, marriage, friendship, healthy habits, social media etiquette, Jewish life and more appear in the Huffington Post, Kveller.com, The Jewish Daily forward and numerous other sites. You can find Nina posting weekly on her blog, or chatting away on Twitter, and on Facebook.

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