Why a female friendship was my first true love

I did fall in love with my new best friend, Michelle, at 14, which was all-consuming. We would give each other cards and poems and go on “dates”. We had no idea what a lesbian was and I wonder if we would have given it a crack if we had known. I suspect not; we modelled ourselves on the relationship, which was never consummated, between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in the BBC’s adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. (Now that I think of it, I often resorted to male role models as the female ones just weren’t there.) We were living our lives like a 1945 novel that examined family and Catholicism while other girls were getting fingered.

It’s well documented how intense female friendships can be, especially at that age, and maybe nothing I’ve ever had with a man has lived up to the romance and excitement of that first liaison. I still love Michelle and although that initial intensity of feeling is long gone, my gratitude for the ongoing friendship isn’t.

I’d found someone I really connected with and while I’d had friends before, it wasn’t until I met her that I truly understood the importance of having someone outside your family who’s in your corner, someone with no obligation to hang out with and support you, who simply likes the cut of your jib. Thank god that was something I worked out relatively early, because without people like Michelle in my life, I might have wound up living in a swamp and talking only to frogs. Although Swamp Lady does have a ring to it, I might have missed out on one of the great joys of life, friendship.

Something else Michelle and I shared was a love of school. We were those girls: drama students, public speakers and suckholes. I’ve joked that I would have been better off smoking and kissing boys, but not only was that not really an option, it also just wasn’t me. I liked studying and getting good marks and I knew, even then, that work was going to be important to me.

I’d realised this was the way to avoid my mother Ann Lucy’s life, and would affirm me in a way that had nothing to do with how I looked. Fortunately, I was also able to use my ability, honed at home, to make people laugh, so I wasn’t despised for being an academically overachieving goody-goody.

I don’t lovingly reflect on my years of Catholic indoctrination but I am grateful for having attended an all-girls school with some terrific teachers who fostered our ambitions. While I’m sure there were pupils in my year who mainly dreamed of becoming a wife and mother, most of the students I liked were smart and wanted careers, and because there were no boys around it never occurred to us that we couldn’t do anything we chose to.

Loading

That’s the odd contradiction of an all-girls Catholic school: the religion is deeply misogynist but both our primary- and high-school principals were terrifying nuns who instilled in us a desire to do our very best, whether that was in food and nutrition class (yes, cooking) or physics and chemistry. Like many Catholic girls, I briefly wanted to be a nun when I was a kid, and if I’d been around a few centuries ago and had wanted to study rather than marry, it might have seemed like a pretty great option.

My school environment meant it never entered my head that a brain and a sense of humour weren’t irresistible traits for any girl to have. What 16-year-old boy wouldn’t prefer a girl who loved reading Tennessee Williams and could make you laugh to someone called Samantha with big tits? Only the ones, as I later discovered, who hadn’t come out yet.

I had absolutely no confidence when it came to the opposite sex, but with even the girls in my year who didn’t look like Heather Locklear as hot cop Stacy Sheridan on T.J. Hooker pairing up, I couldn’t quite work out why boys weren’t interested in me at all. (I may not have thought I was pretty but Jesus, even the girl who’d shaved her own eyebrows off was getting more action than me.)

Still, I wasn’t too worried: my brother Niall assured me life would change completely once I went to university and met my people, the students I actually had stuff in common with rather than those I’d been forced to swim with in my small Catholic-educated pool.

Edited extract from Turns Out, I’m Fine (Simon & Schuster) by Judith Lucy, on sale now.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale April 11. To read more from Sunday Life, visit The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.