ABSTRACT
Current research funding calls, age-friendly discourse, and social gerontology raise a clarion call about the rising risks of social isolation. This sense of urgency has led to curated friendships through programs that offer a seeming solution to a problem that goes far beyond a lack of companionship, often to a lack of adequate care support for people who need it. And yet humanities scholars have yet to take seriously the role of friendship in later life. Narrative fiction invites deeper ways of thinking and feeling about late life friends, loneliness, and isolation. To emphasise the urgency of taking friendship seriously and to illustrate the growing popular refrain about social isolation, this chapter begins with a comparison of videos from mainstream Canadian news and from qualitative research on age-friendly communities. The subsequent analysis of Helen Garner’s 2008 Australian novel The Spare Room exposes how friendship can illuminate as much as it can assuage loneliness, especially during acute illness. Questioning the social practices and cultural politics of friendship through fictional analysis exposes productive tensions and promising practices at the heart of care relationships, opening up new ways of addressing social isolation as well as loneliness.
