Tag Archives: life

March 18, 2026 · 9:21 am

Writing about Grown‑Up Friendships

Strong friendships can increase your lifespan by up to 50%, lower your stress levels, and reduce your risk of depression, high blood pressure, and even chronic illnesses.

All good, yeah. Who doesn’t want to be healthier?

When we’re younger, friends just… happen. You sit beside someone in class, or you share a shift at a terrible job, or you bond over the fact that you both survived the same haircut trend. But in middle age, friendship is a choice. A deliberate, hopeful, slightly vulnerable choice.

We’re all wandering around with our emotional tote bags full of past friendships, heartbreaks, and half‑finished self‑help books, hoping to stumble into someone who gets our jokes and doesn’t judge our YouTube feed.

Middle‑age friendships skip the performance. There’s no pretending to be cooler, calmer, or more put together than you are. Everyone is too tired for that. You show up as your real self — the one who has opinions about laundry detergent and about how over the speed limit is too over the speed limit.

Adult friendship is built on tiny, ridiculous moments:

The shared eye roll across a crowded room
The “tell me everything” voice note
The way they know your coffee order, your coping mechanisms, and your favourite band from back in the day
The fact that they’ve seen you cry, laugh‑snort, and rage‑clean

There’s something beautifully hopeful about new friendships — the idea that even now, even with all the history and heartbreak and hard‑won wisdom we carry, there are still people out there who will get us. Who will laugh with us. Who will sit beside us in the messy middle of life and say, “Same.”

But building and maintaining new friendships at a time in life when everyone is juggling careers, kids, aging parents, existential dread, and the sudden realization that staying up past 10 p.m. now requires a recovery period is a big ask — a next‑level commitment.

Worth it? Absolutely.

I’ve had the great fortune in middle age to have met and curated some of the most meaningful friendships of my life. These connections — the ones that feel earned and carry an emotional honesty that only shows up once you’ve lived long enough to stop pretending — are what drew me to writing about friendships.

Writing about adult friendships means writing characters who bond over shared exhaustion, mutual grievances, and complicated backstories. As a writer, I’m juggling characters with decades of personality quirks, emotional scar tissue, and the hilarious reality that grown‑ups can absolutely form a lifelong bond over one good conversation in a parking lot. These relationships are messy, layered, and wildly relatable.

In the end, I write about adult friendships because they’re the real plot twist of middle age — the unexpected relationships that sneak in, shake things up, and prove we’re not done growing yet.

Here’s to the brave, awkward, hilarious act of making new friends in the middle of life. And to telling their stories!

Writing Characters Who Are Starting Over at Midlife

Ah, midlife. Where achy joints and the consequences of past mistakes become real. The temptation to think of it as a cliff we tumble over—or a force we have to fight against—is reinforced by the messaging that assaults us every day. But here’s what I’ve figured out: midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a recalibration, a period when the brain, the body, and the self all quietly renegotiate what matters.

Adult‑development research has found that midlife is actually a phase of increased emotional stability. Not because life gets easier, but because our priorities shift. We become more selective about where we put our energy. We stop chasing every expectation. We start choosing with intention.

In 2015, my husband and I moved to the country—yup, right around the time we hit our midlife sweet spot. Maybe it was the move, maybe the country air, maybe just being midlife, but soon I found myself knee-deep in my own recalibration. I now had the time and space to examine the decisions I’d made—both in life and in my career. It didn’t take long to realize most of them had been shaped by duty and societal expectations. And since the truth had only ever been a whisper away, it took no time at all to see what needed to change. I was a writer who wasn’t writing enough, and that needed to shift. The shift was shifting. The starting over was starting.

I began work on my second novel, Stillwater Lake, which—unsurprisingly—became a story about new beginnings and the complicated courage it takes to start over.

In the book, Tallie and Jim, both middle‑aged, aren’t running toward a shiny new beginning. They’re walking, slowly and reluctantly, toward the truth. The stakes feel different. More intimate. More earned. They’re not trying to become someone new; they’re trying to become a more honest version of themselves.

It took what wasn’t working to stop working, and an ice storm to force them into a much needed moment of stillness. Midlife does that—it interrupts us. It asks us to look honestly at what we’ve carried and what we’re still clinging to. Starting over isn’t dramatic or glamorous. It’s incremental. It’s the slow work of resting when we need to, returning to what matters, facing what we’ve avoided, and letting go of the idea that it’s too late to change.

New beginnings are scary—but maybe the bravest decisions we’ll ever make.

The Moment That Started It All

Why did I write Look Over Your Shoulder? And more specifically—why this story?

Simple. Grief made me do it.

Twenty-two years ago, I lost a dear friend to leukemia. Heidi was an only child with rare lineage, which made finding a bone marrow donor within her extended family nearly impossible. At the time, she had a 13-year-old daughter and every reason to fight. So, she pulled on the boxing gloves and jumped in the ring. An international search began, and eventually, a match was found—an anonymous donor willing to give her a chance.

Then Toronto was gripped by the SARS pandemic.

Today, we understand what a pandemic means to society. But in 2003, our understanding was vague. Quarantines were strict. Visitors weren’t allowed in hospitals. After her transplant, Heidi was isolated—cut off from the very people she needed most. She and her family launched a fierce campaign to change the hospital’s no-visitors policy. She contacted local media. She made noise. And she won.

But despite all of it, just weeks after the transplant, Heidi lost her battle.

Once I moved through the early stages of grief, the “what ifs” began to loop. What if she’d found a donor within her family? What if she’d received treatment earlier? What if the system had bent sooner?

Lucky me—I have a built-in grief buster: writing.

To explain my loss and make peace with those looping questions, I began a new story. In it, I asked: what if a leukemia patient did find a donor within their immediate family? But unlike Heidi’s donor—who never knew their generous gift hadn’t saved her—this donor had to watch as their loved one’s body rejected the transplant. And what if that donor was the one person in the family least equipped to handle either the procedure or the decline?

And so, Look Over Your Shoulder began.

My wheelhouse is character. And this book is full of them. Through writing this story, I didn’t just learn how to shape a novel—I learned how different people carry grief. How they bury it. How they wear it. How they survive it.

Look Over Your Shoulder started from loss. But quickly became something more: a way to understand love, legacy, and the fragile threads that bind us.

You can pre-order your Look Over Your Shoulder e-book now and take advantage of this introductory price: https://books2read.com/u/bzGr7z

Print version will be available for sale on October 21, 2025.

Tag Archives: life

Writing about Grown‑Up Friendships

Writing Characters Who Are Starting Over at Midlife

The Moment That Started It All

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