Friend of My Youth

The narrator of this story is a fiction writer, drawn to the story of the Grieves sisters as a means of understanding her own mother. As a young woman, her impulse to write about the Grieves sisters has its roots in ambition and impatience. She is anxious to establish herself in the world, and also to write over her mother’s story; more broadly, to not make the same mistakes that she believes her mother to have made. Although she never knew the Grieves sisters, and knows their story only through her mother, she believes that she has a modern insight into the story that her mother lacks. She is frustrated in particular by her mother’s silence around the character of Robert Deal, and her idealizing of her old friend Flora Grieves.

Where the young narrator sees clear holes in her mother’s story and believes that she knows how to fill these holes, the older narrator—the narrator who is telling us this story—is less certain. She no longer believes that she understands Flora’s character, in part because Flora ends up changing her life and leaving her family home. This makes her story considerably less tidy and causes the narrator to speculate about Flora’s independent secular life: “I have wondered what kind of a store [Flora worked in]. A hardware store or a five-and-ten, where she has to wear a coverall, or a drugstore, where she is uniformed like a nurse, or a Ladies’ Wear, where she is expected to be genteelly fashionable?” (24).

This slipping into the present tense shows the degree to which the narrator is haunted by the story. The character of Flora, like the narrator’s own mother, is long dead, but both characters are alive in the narrator’s mind. It is their contradictions and unknowability that keep them alive and compel the narrator to write about them. While her young writer self was motivated by answers and certainties, her older self is more motivated by questions. These questions relate directly to the grief the narrator feels at her mother’s death and telling Flora’s story—really re-telling a story of her mother’s—allows the narrator to indirectly attempt to understand the mother she has lost.

The inherent mystery of the story has a religious aspect to it, even though the narrator is not religious. However, she is intrigued by the piety of the Grieves family in a way that her mother is not. The narrator’s mother sees only privation and dreariness in how the Grieves family lives, and she finds their church stark and uncomfortable: “Oh, that church, my mother said, having attended it once, out of curiosity—that drear building miles on the other side of town, no organ or piano and plain glass in the windows” (8). The narrator has more of a distance from the Grieves family, and she understands them to live as she does—by words and ideas—even if their ideas are not the same as hers. This is seen in her dwelling on the family’s religious texts, which hold no interest for her mother: “The torturing, defeating, but for some minds irresistible pileup of interlocking and contradictory notions. My mother could resist it […] Ideas were not what she was curious about, ever” (12). Through this contrast, the Grieves sisters become a tool that allows the narrator to appreciate the differences between herself and her mother. Although the narrator is unable to reach a definite conclusion about either Flora or her mother by the end of the story, the act of writing the story enables the narrator to reconcile herself somewhat to the impossibility of ever completely knowing these two women.