Q: Is it possible to heal your most toxic friendship?
A: Sometimes.
Today I release the podcast I’ve been trying to record since 2018—a very real, honest conversation with my former podcast host (HOME podcast)1,
, who is also the person that for the past decade I couldn’t live with, and also could not live without. The larger-than-life presence I could not outrun, stop stalking on the internet, measuring myself against, or wishing I could call every time something or actually anything happened.Some people have exes like this. I had Laura McKowen.
You can go now and listen to it on Patreon (where I release episodes early) or Apple (below), or anywhere you get podcasts, or you can keep reading for a tiny bit of backstory.
The episode is a dive into our decade-long best friendship and creative partnership, which both inspired the best work of our lives and simultaneously destroyed us. We made each other big and we made each other small, and often we did both in the same breath. We talk about what really happened behind the scenes while creating HOME (including in our own heads), what happened after that first break, and the many attempts at reconciliation that ended as fast as they started.
Our last public podcast was published in January 2018, an interview with Maia Szalavitz; we meant to do a final episode, but were so fucking traumatized by each other we couldn’t even make it to the recording, and our then-assistants dissolved our friendship in a Google Doc.
When that happened—when our show ended and we blocked each other on Instagram and on our phones and in our hearts—I thought my work was over, and I probably thought my life was over too. That day I went to see I, Tanya by myself at an Indie theater and I wish I could say I cried but I could not; I could only freeze because I did not know how to do what I was doing without her. I did not know how to write or talk or have confidence or an opinion or build anything or be who I was without Laura. She was how I was Holly Whitaker, or the Holly Whitaker I had become, and I had to learn from scratch how to be who I was with her as an absence.
Between then and now, there were many eager and honestly chaotic attempts at reconciliation that ended in the same exact way—fury, blocking, shit-talking, monster-making, othering. And then coming back together. And then doing it all over again. The last time it happened, I told her to take my blurb off her new book, which I still regret, which still hurts. (I also have no idea if this happened because I couldn’t bring myself to look at her book. Maybe there’s a blurb from me. Maybe there’s not.)