Rachel Cooke CallingCa the shots
Nervous as I am of organising parties, could hardly have launched a book about friendship without throwing one. And so it was that last Tuesday night, I found myself in the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, north London, surrounded by those pals of mine who were good enough to trog through the rush hour rain to celebrate with me. The Virago Book of Friendship is the result of a year’s work and a lifetime’s reading – and as an anthology, it’s a bit like a party itself, Virginia Woolf cosying up to Sarah Waters in one corner, and Shirley Conran chatting to Charlotte Brontë in another. Nora Ephron, whose laugh may be heard over the crowd, is moving around the room with a tray of canapés, Edith Wharton is wondering why the champagne isn’t premier cru, and Colette’s about to go outside for a cigarette.
As the book’s editor, I had rather more to do than rush around refilling glasses. So many shelves ransacked! People have asked if I have a favourite extract, a question that’s hard to answer: I’m devotedly fond of everything in it. But if I had to choose one piece, it would be an account by the American scholar Terry Castle of her doomed friendship with the writer Susan Sontag. I challenge you not to laugh out loud at the vignette in which Sontag relives her experience of sniper fire during the siege of Sarajevo in 1993. This she does during a visit to Stanford University in California, on Palo Alto’s chi-chi main drag, bobbing zanily from Restoration Hardware to Baskin-Robbins while pointing all the while at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at poor old Castle (“Our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick, Madge, or possibly Stalin and Malenkov,”) to encourage her to keep up.