“Friends” by Grace Paley (1985)

This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is

dying. The women then go home on the train. It ends with a

brief conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-

year-old son. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold

spaces within it. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of

the world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions,

our children’s colonisation of our hearts and our

powerlessness ultimately to protect them. Its understated

tone is perfectly pitched: the narrative moves gently, then

soars, into either sadness, or joyful contentment – again and

again. I am in this story, and so is the world. Ahdaf Soueif