At the start of October, I went to Warsaw to give a talk about my research on the history of emotions. When I got the invitation, I assumed I would decline. Since the Pandemic, my taste for travel has vanished. Even the thought tires me. Travel costs me practically (I have young children), and ethically. I have become a ninja at saying ‘no’.
I am not sure what made me accept. Maybe, after so many years of trying to stay in control, I finally felt ready to lose myself again.
After the conference ended, I stayed an extra day to be a tourist. There is a beautiful French word dépaysement, (literally: decountryfication), that describes the experience of being in a strange place. To me, this word speaks of getting lost, stumbling disorientated and giddy through unfamiliar streets, encountering unfamiliar parts of ourselves too.
I spent the day ignoring the twitch in my hand, the impulse to reach for my phone and check the map. Instead, I wandered. I saw the scars of the city’s tumultuous history, its wars and occupations, famines and uprisings. I walked the streets where the Jewish Ghetto had been between 1940 and 1943. The country was about to go to the polls, and I got caught up in a protest march against the rightwing populists.
But a tiny hand-sewn doll is what I remember most clearly.
I found her in a glass case in the Museum of Warsaw, home to around 8,000 everyday objects, silent witnesses and participants in the life of the city.
She had been made by a group of women held in Warsaw’s Pawiak Prison 1942. She was no bigger than my palm. She wore peacock blue pyjamas made of satin. On her head, a ruby satin turban, decorated with glass beads. Her wire hands were held up to her face. She looked like she was either about to burst into laughter, or shield her face from horror.
Approximately 100,000 people, many of them Jewish women and children, were imprisoned at Pawiak by the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. 37,000 were executed or tortured to death on its grounds. Most of the rest were deported to labour camps. Some were released. Some escaped, often with the help of the Polish guards.
The group of women had made this doll in secret as a wedding gift for their recently-released friend, Jadwiga Dudzińska-Bednarska. And it was smuggled out by a female warden named Kazimiera Markuszewska. The doll attested to the profound meaning of friendship amid the atrocities of the war. It told a story about defiance and tenderness. It reminded me what we will risk to connect with another human being.
For the last five years (yes, really!) I have been writing a book about friendship between women. It’s called Bad Friend, and is about the lost histories of female friendships, and the way these friendships have been demonised. Assuming – and some days that feels like a big assumption – I get finished on time, it will be published in 2025 by Faber&Faber in the UK and Celadon (Macmillan) in the US. You can read a bit about it here.
The weeks leading up to my trip to Warsaw, I was pushing and pushing to finish a first full draft to send to my editors. I was up late each night, working eighteen-hour days, while my husband took over my share of the domestic duties. I pressed send on the draft the day I travelled to Warsaw. Sitting in the airport Pret A Manger, I told myself that this was the start of the end of this project that had absorbed so much of my life.
But that’s not how writing works.
I thought I was reaching the end, but the world kept sending me new ideas. A doll. A group of prisoners defiantly, joyfully celebrating, hungrily reaching towards each other in the darkest of times. A new thread to follow. Writing is never done, not really.
Here is something I have learnt this past five years: if you become interested in the history of friendship, if you spent your days studying treasured objects, clothes, tear-stained diaries, letters written in anger or remorse, you will stop thinking of objects as inert, docile, neutral. You will start thinking of all the ways objects come alive.
You may even think that these objects have somehow absorbed the feelings of the women who exchanged them or held them close or used them to feel with in the past. And sometimes – foolishly, indulgently – you might even permit yourself to imagine that when you cradle this object, or stroke it, it will transmit some of that long-lost feeling into you.
And this will make you feel less alone.
Before the doll’s glass case, I find my fingers twitching again. Not for my phone. I want the barrier between me and the doll to magically vanish, I want to reach out and touch her face, silk turban, her hands. I imagine the women gathering scraps of material and hiding them. I imagine their fingers stitching in the dark. I imagine the doll hidden in the warden Markuszewska’s bag, or secreted against her skin. I imagine Dudzińska-Bednarska receiving the doll, kissing it, perhaps weeping for her friends, or laughing at the surprise of it, and holding it against her racing heart. I want to feel this moment for myself.
Writing a book is always a way of answering some question in our own lives. Though usually, it’s not until you’re almost finished writing that you can hear the question most clearly. I think I was called to write about friendship because I longed for its intimacies again. I had a feeling that friendship was slowly and almost imperceptibly vanishing from my life.
I want to be vulnerable writing here, to you, in TheFutureFeeling. Academics are often haunted by seeming less-than-professional, less-than-perfect. A witch I know, Natalie K. Miller, herself a recovering academic, said this to me last night: academics are endlessly trying to be beyond reproach in anything they publish, yet you sure as hell are going to get reproached anyway (and I sure as hell have been reproached this week, but that is for another letter).
I believe vulnerability is the best way to connect. Being alone in my study is necessary to write a book. And so is the endless attention to detail, to dates, to places. But I know there are dangers here too, terrible loops of perfectionism, feeling stuck, avoidance.
I think of the women making that doll, sending it out into the world to their friend, their need to share their joy and humanity. I think of the risk they took for that connection.
If they can do that, I can do this one small thing.
I can write to you.