having allowed a smoker into my life. Angela Kennedy and I still laughed hard
together, even though she was working as a teacher in New Jersey while also
parenting a young son and trying to hold herself steady as her marriage slowly
imploded. We’d known each other as goofy, half-mature college girls, and now
we were adults, with adult lives and adult concerns. That idea alone sometimes
struck us as hilarious.
Suzanne, meanwhile, was the same free spirit she’d been when we roomed
together at Princeton—flitting in and out of my life with varying predictability,
continuing to measure the value of her days purely by whether they were
pleasurable or not. We’d go long stretches without talking but then pick up the
thread of our friendship with ease. As always, I called her Screwzy and she called
me Miche. Our worlds continued to be as different as they’d been at school,
when she was trekking off to eating-club parties and kicking her dirty laundry
beneath the bed and I was color coding my Sociology 201 notes. Even then,
Suzanne was like a sister whose life I could only track from afar, across the gulf of
our inherent differences. She was maddening, charming, and always important to
me. She’d ask my advice and then willfully ignore it. Would it be bad to date a
philandering semi-famous pop star? Why, yes it would, but she’d do it anyway,
because why not? Most galling to me was when she turned down an opportunity
to go to an Ivy League business school after college, deciding that it would be too
much work and therefore no fun. Instead, she got her MBA from a not-so-
stressful program at a state school, which I viewed as kind of a lazy move.
Suzanne’s choices sometimes seemed like an affront to my way of doing
things, a vote in favor of easing up and striving less. I can say now that I judged
her unfairly for them. At the time, though, I just thought I was right.
Not long after I’d started dating Barack, I called Suzanne to gush about my
feelings for him. She’d been thrilled to hear me so happy—happiness being her
currency. She also had news of her own: She was ditching her job as a computer
specialist at the Federal Reserve and going traveling—not for weeks, but for
months. Suzanne and her mom were soon to head off on some round-the-world-
style adventure. Because why not?
I could never guess whether Suzanne knew unconsciously that something
strange was happening in the cells of her body, that a silent hijacking was already
under way. What I did know was that during the fall of 1989, while I wore
patent leather pumps and sat through long, dull conference-room meetings at
Sidley, Suzanne and her mother were trying not to spill curry on their sundresses