Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women

When I first came upon this title on a Facebook feed, I stopped in my digital tracks. Did I really want to read about and wallow in the breakup of "besties?" Since childhood, I've had best friends who were closer to me than sisters or spouses. For women, best friends are another kind of "significant other," and when you lose your best friend, the grief is as debilitating as a death in the family. However, when such a relationship comes to its often mystifying end, no one brings you a casserole, sends you a sympathy card, or takes you out to laugh about how you're better off now. You're left floating alone on your wreck, drifting out to sea on an undertow of dread that you are somehow flawed, otherwise your best friend wouldn't have dumped you. And the truth is, now you ARE damaged--because your best friend dumped you.Women's monumental friendships are given cultural mole-hill status. Therefore, we speak little of our losses and aren't sure how to handle ourselves, let alone comfort a friend who's going through it. When you lose a best friend, you've lost the very person who would've helped you put your shattered self back together and helped you comprehend the incomprehensible. The research, Gaby tells us in the introduction, shows that when a best friend erases you, you find yourself "without context, possibly without worth." You suffer "ensuing depression and isolation." And that is why this is such an important book.Remembering the lonely aftermath of bestie-loss, I ordered the book. I'm glad did. I kept company with twenty-five awesome essayists confiding about best friends loved and lost. I'm grateful to the brave Nina Gaby for putting this nerve-rattling collection together. Lindsey Kemp curdled my blood with "The Hate Note." In "A Snowball's Chance," the candid and kind Penny Guisinger swept me back to my days as a young mother trying to balance parenting, partnership, and friendships that "sparkle." Melody Breyer-Grell in "Just Say No" let me hang out in the dog park sharing snarky comments and puzzling over what could've gone so wrong. I read them all, and if you ever loved and lost a best friend, so should you.The collection helped me understand that these losses really are as tragic as they feel, and yes, I am inherently flawed, but so were my friends, and so are we all. Like any good literature, DUMPED increased my store of gratitude and wisdom, helping me forgive my dumpers, forgive myself for getting dumped, and forgive myself for having dumped a few in turn.

This book is for anyone who has known the pain of unexpectedly losing a cherished friend without explanation. There is wisdom and solace here. The women learn to incorporate the losses into their lives and to gain strength and growth from the experiences. While reading the book, I was reminded that people almost always have reasons for what they do, even if those reasons do not make sense to us. If an adored friend suddenly exits, it is most likely due to a perceived slight, betrayal or an issue with that friend that the abandoned friend may not be privy to. I'm not saying that these women are to blame, but merely that there may be many factors involved that the abandoned friend may never know. Female friendships can be complex, insular, fraught and complicated. We expect so much from each other as women that perhaps there are times when that intense bond cannot be sustained or will not stand the test of time. This book reminds us to treasure the friends we have, cherish the good memories of those we have lost, and perhaps most importantly, to value learning to stand on our own.

Nina Gaby’s collection of essays Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women is as direct and unsparing about women’s capacity to cruelly leave each other’s friendships as the title suggests. What the fascinating voices represented in these stories deliver is a chorus of shock and attendant feelings of betrayal, isolation, self-doubt and intense pain that are common to nearly every one of the women’s experiences. Gaby makes a clear distinction between friendships that dissipate over time and distance in a “natural” way, and those that are abruptly ended by one side, most often for reasons that remain unexplained and never understood. The essay contributors, as Gaby aptly states in her acknowledgments are “gifted writers…who so honestly, and with such grace, humor, and hard-won answers, joined.. in exploring the often frail and unfathomable nature of friendship.” One has to add that Gaby, as editor, brilliantly tapped and ordered these strong and varied voices to sustain the reader through this engaging book.

Gloria Steinem said it years ago: "No one can break your heart like a woman." Yes, I've had my heartbreaks with men, but somehow the women who betrayed me were the hardest to bear, because you expect women to behave better. You expect your girlfriends to have your back when the man mistreats you, the child gets sick, your world falls apart. Having been there a few times myself, I found a little bit of my own story in each essay in "Dumped." I found comfort in knowing there is a whole community of us. There is a whole world full of mean girls, friends who silently slip away when you are in crisis, friends who project their world of hurt onto your shoulders. I couldn't put this book down, and would recommend it to every woman, at every age. Buy it for your sister, your mom, your daughter, because at some point, sadly, she's going to need it.

Despite the fact that this compilation stings - you'll revisit old hurts, or wince at your own past bad behavior - the quality of the writing is so good that it's a pleasure to read. And there's considerable humor here as well (Melody Breyer-Grell is flat-out hilarious). The piece by Penny Guisinger I found particularly compelling. For the most part I forgot the thesis of the book and simply enjoyed getting to know all the women in these pages - I wanted to "friend" them all! Nina Gaby has done a fabulous job of shining the spotlight on female friendship.

Great book!! The essays flow really well together and manage to examine this phenomenon from all walks and stages of life. Nina Gaby has found some truly amazing writers and I can't wait to look them up and find more of their work.