Review of THE GEOGRAPHY OF FRIENDSHIP by Sally Piper

4.5 Stars
Three women (Samantha, Lisa, and Nicole) in their forties re-enact a 5-day hike on an isolated coastal  trail.  When they began this hike 24 years earlier, they had a confrontation with an aggressive man in the parking lot at the trailhead. Thereafter he watched them and deliberately instilled fear by making silent but threatening gestures.  It is obvious that something happened before the end of the trip; whatever transpired changed the three and destroyed their friendship because they have not spoken to each other in over 20 years. 

Lisa convinces the other two women to take the hike again.  She suggests they can reshape the memories of the original experience, thereby healing the wounds that were inflicted.  Perhaps too their fractured friendship can be mended; she hopes “to have the qualities of their friendship returned to her and all the goodness that might come with it if it can be.”  There is certainly no doubt that the experience had a major impact on their lives.  Lisa thinks of how the landscape and what happened “Damaged them.  How much of what happened here has been carried with them into the everyday, washed up in their lives like those fragments of stone.”  Samantha thinks of how “their friendship had unraveled and Samantha doesn’t think she’s felt good about herself since.”  Nicole thinks about how “She didn’t believe or trust in herself to succeed [because everything] . . . that was strong and good about her was taken away . . . [and] She lost her faith in humanity that day.”

It is not until the end that the reader learns exactly what happened on that fateful hike, so there is a great deal of suspense in the book.  As the women walk the trail in the present, there are flashbacks to what occurred along the same sections of trail.  There was a pervasive air of menace and even the rugged landscape seemed threatening.  Though the timeframe has changed, the locale is the same so the women are anxious, and because of their 20-year estrangement, there’s tension among them.  All of these emotions are passed on to the reader.

Each of the women emerges as a distinct individual with clearly identifiable traits.  For instance, one is motivated by anger, another is the peacekeeper, and the third distrusts people.  This differentiation is achieved by the novel’s structure.  Each woman is the focus of an equal number of chapters.  We hear her inner dialogue as she remembers the past, thinks about the choices she made then, and considers how subsequent decisions in her life were influenced by the past:  “Who or what might she have been if these things hadn’t happened to her?” 

Each of the women is dynamic.  Mostly each learns about herself.  Lisa, for instance, acknowledges that when they drifted apart, “they weren’t running from each other.  They were running from themselves.”  At the beginning, it is easy for them to blame each other for what happened:  “Trying to make her say Yep, all my fault, so she can have a clear conscience.”  Eventually, however, each must acknowledge her role in what happened during the hike and the dissolution of their friendship:  “Memory might try and serve it differently, that one person instigated . . . more than another, but in truth they were all complicit . . . ”. 

The book examines the dynamics of friendships.  Samantha describes their friendship:  “They were tight.  Inseparable.  Individual slights led to collective umbrage.  Heart scars were shared.”  Nicole agrees:  “They only had to be themselves.  That’s what made their friendship strong.”  On the first hike, the friendship was tested; as they faced increasing fear, their stress caused them to turn on each other.  And after the first hike, “It only took two weeks to undo eight years [of friendship].”  Each mourns the loss of the friendships.  One of them acknowledges “She still feels the loss of what they had.  She registers it as an irretrievable absence inside her” and another thinks her friends would have helped her, that maybe “they’d have looked out for her and steered her away from a man they would have recognized as good at manipulation.”  Can the women repair their relationships if they realize that a friendship has “to be nurtured and cared for, like a garden” and that if one lightens the burden of another, “She doesn’t notice the extra weight after a while.  It soon becomes a part of her own”? 

As soon as I started reading this book, I was totally absorbed.  It is so emotionally immersive and thought-provoking that I will not soon forget it.  I keep asking myself how I would have reacted in similar circumstances.