How well do you really know your friends? It’s not a rhetorical question. Let me ask a different one: when was the last time one of your close friends surprised you? Most likely a very long time ago. But when we think that we truly know someone, are we in fact confusing true understanding of them with the ability to predict their responses and actions? And is that even an important distinction anyway?
I surprised certain people—colleagues and friends both, who’d known me for years, even decades— when I first told them I’d secured a publishing contract. Their congratulations and expressions of delight couldn’t entirely mask their perplexity: they hadn’t predicted this; they hadn’t fully comprehended my commitment to writing, if they’d taken note of it at all. I was in a certain pigeon-hole in their head—a mother and an athlete, with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a job in finance in the city of London—and they hadn’t expected me to spring out of it, like a jack-in-the-box. Sooner or later they would start a sentence that trailed off unfinished, such as “I hadn’t realised…” Or, “I didn’t know…” This is a benign example, of course—but for all that they were thrilled for me, I could see that this unexpected turn of events was unsettling to them. They were being forced to reassess me. And if they had to reassess me, who else might they need to reconsider? What else might they have missed?
Friendships formed with people who have the same interests as ourselves are especially prone to a blinkered view. My teenaged years were spent in a haze of chlorine, ploughing up and down swimming pools in pursuit of ever faster times. When I reached university and joined the swim team, it was extraordinarily easy to fall into socialising with the other swimmers. We had the same shared history: painfully early morning alarms, endless hours in the pool, social events sacrificed for competitions that took up entire weekends. Surely anyone who had chosen to invest enormous amounts of time and energy in the same way that I had must think the same way that I did, and have the same values? A desperately naïve assumption, I now think, but not one that I questioned at the time. It’s an assumption that plays into the dynamics of the friendship group at the heart of my latest novel, How To Kill Your Best Friend, the members of which met in just that way—at university, through the swim team. We come across them more than a decade later, when the passage of time has scattered them to very different lives in different parts of the globe, and one of their number has mysteriously drowned. They’re not even the same people they were at university—they can’t be, time and life events have shaped them into something new—and yet they presume nothing has changed, that they can extrapolate from those years spent training together within the comforting bubble of academia to predict each other’s behaviour when under threat on a remote island… Perhaps that gap, between belief and reality, would never have tripped them up had their lives continued in the same vein, with no unexpected obstacles along the way; then the distinction between true knowledge and mere predictability would have been immaterial. But we writers—particularly writers of psychological thrillers!—are not kind to our characters: we put them in extreme circumstances to see what unfolds. And, given writers in this genre are not exactly glass-half-full people either, what unfolds is usually rather harrowing…
It's fiction, of course—but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. I recognise that my viewpoint might be darker than most (again, an occupational hazard), but if you ever find yourself in dire straits, I suggest you think twice before putting all your faith in a dear friend, no matter how well you think you know them. We can never truly know how someone might behave in extreme circumstances; we can never completely know our friends.
I’ll leave you to mull on that unsettling thought.
Lexie Elliott graduated from Oxford University, where she obtained a doctorate in theoretical physics. A keen sportswoman, she swam and played waterpolo at university, and later swam the English Channel solo. She works in fund management in London, where she lives with her husband and two sons.