My ninth book is published this week, and in recent years I’ve described my writing like this: I take care with my sentences, but exquisite prose isn’t my goal. My goal is to give the reader the feeling that you – and by you, I mean me – have when you’re going for a long walk with a close friend, and the friend says: “The craziest thing just happened to me.” What?! You think and possibly say. Tell me immediately! And then what happened, and then what happened? As a writer, this is the urgency I’m chasing, this is the investment, the richness of emotion, the confiding and closeness and caring.

A line in Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours, a book I’ve discussed with many friends, perfectly captures for me this sense of participating in a bottomless conversation: “I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours.”

That intersection of a juicy story and a real connection is one of the very best parts of being a person. I’m 49 now, and I’m profoundly grateful for the intensity and centrality of friendship in middle age.

There are the friends I take literal and regular long walks with: Carolyn, with whom I went to college, and Erin, who I connected with in 2019 over lunch at a Cuban restaurant. There’s my graduate school friend Susanna, whom I text with anywhere from three to seven million times a day. There’s the group I think of as my lady writer friends, with whom I have Friday lunches to talk about how weird and isolating and wonderful it is to write fiction. There’s the crew that talks mostly about sex and the body – if an Instagram post about vagina exercises goes viral, there’s a 110% chance one of these women will send it to the group chat – and there’s Kathryn and Sara, two women I began having dinner with after we realised we each had two children at the same two schools.

And yes, I do have some male friends: Ernesto, or, as one of my kids dubbed him, “your new bestie Ernestie”, who’s a journalist, and Will, who’s also a writer, and Jeff who, when my kids started at the school his daughter attends, met me at a uniform store because I didn’t know which items or how many of them to buy. If it seems at this point like I’m just bragging about how popular I am, I confess it wasn’t always so. In 2007, when my husband and I were engaged, we moved from Philadelphia, where he’d attended graduate school, to St Louis, Missouri. He was a professor and got along with his new colleagues, but I didn’t make a close friend for more than a year. I was working from home on my third novel, untethered to any institution, and I spent enormous amounts of time alone. Data shows that the number of close friends people have tends to decline in our late 20s and early 30s; as it was for me, the situation is often linked to pairing up as a couple and moving around geographically.

Eventually, after having kids, I made “mom friends”, and I still hold a place in my heart for the women with whom I exchanged complaints about sleep deprivation, recommendations for baby carriers, and wonder over the little creatures we were raising. But in terms of time and emotions, the years when my two children were very young were ones in which I was less available to other adults and other adults were less available to me.

Now that my kids are teenagers, it’s true that my schedule is more flexible: not only can I go out for dinner without worrying that anyone in the house will cry about my absence, but it’s possible my absence won’t even be noticed. Yet schedules alone don’t account for the friendship renaissance I feel so fortunate to experience. The essential ingredient of middle-aged friendships, I believe, is openness. And the reality is that by the time you’re middle-aged, you inevitably have lots to be open about.

While some people experience dramatic challenges, disappointments and sorrows at a young age, by the time you’re 40 or 50, everyone has faced them. Everyone has experienced setbacks – the deaths of family members or close friends, estrangement from family, divorce, health struggles – as well as more ordinary daily problems, like perimenopause and surly kids. When we can be honest about these sorrows and challenges, it’s a powerful point of bonding. Again, research backs me up: the psychological term to explain why divulging personal information creates intimacy is known as social penetration theory, which is definitely a phrase my sex-focused group chat friends would make jokes about.

More colloquially, there’s the phenomenon of giving no fucks. On the podcast The Shift, which features women over 40 discussing being over 40, the journalist Sam Baker concludes each interview by asking the subject how many fucks she gives. The implication, obviously, is that the more we’ve all learned, the less we give. (I said I give three. I have no idea if I meant out of 10, a thousand, or some other number because Baker doesn’t say what the upper limit is.)