Between Friends: A Year in Letters

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Oonagh Berry and Helen Levine are long-time feminists, authors, and
social activists, living in Ottawa, who wrote a letter to each other
every two weeks from July 2001 to July 2002. Although some letters came
from abroad (Oonagh visited Dublin, where she was born, and Helen took
her annual holiday in Mexico), they wrote not so much about what they
did as about what they thought while they moved into their later years.
It is an engaging book for both men and women, young and old, for it
contains much wisdom and cause for reflection even when the reader
disagrees with the writer.

As the correspondence opens, Oonagh, in her 60s, is a counsellor in a
women’s addiction centre and about to go through the hesitations of
retirement. She frequently looks back on her Irish childhood and plans
in the future to walk the Camino Trail in Spain by herself. Helen, in
her late 70s, is a former teacher of women’s studies at Carleton
University. She decries the waning intensity of the women’s movement
and men’s inability to study the history of feminism with the same
dedication “that they bring to science ... to war.” Yet she is
surprised to find herself reading a male author (Richard Wright’s
Clara Callan).

Both women are articulate and opinionated. Although they feel isolated
as feminists, they live in apparent harmony with husbands and distant
families. They both cry when others laugh but they disagree on hospital
visits: Oonagh, who needs her private space, writes that they are an
intrusion, while Helen responds that she needs the support of the
community. Together they explore their growing friendship and delight in
its freedom.

One intriguing aspect to these letters is that the authors frequently,
sometimes on the same day, met each other for lunch, talked on the
phone, played bridge. So how is taking a pen in hand different? As Helen
puts it, “Letters are much more than I ever imagined.” Those of us
who no longer write them may have lost something in our lives.