I HAVE KNOWN HEARTBREAK. It has brought me to my knees. I have sobbed in my bed, talked my girlfriends’ ears off, prayed to die because it was so bad. I thought I could not live without those men. And now? I can barely recall what they looked like.

But let me tell you about the two women friends I have lost — I can remember the timbre of their voices, how sweat would form in pools on their necks on a hot summer day, the way a laugh would bubble up in them when I said something funny.

The first, Dani, was so stunning that it felt good just to be in her presence. She had Michelle Pfeiffer’s face, Jennifer Lopez’s body and Julia Roberts’s hair. She wasn’t particularly bright, but really, how was I to know that through all that hair? We liked to shop together and wore the same size shoe, and for a while that seemed enough. Then one night she left a bar with my boyfriend. When I told her that this was definitely not OK, she told me to grow up. She put on some lip gloss and went out dancing with him. I couldn’t stop weeping . . . not because I missed him, but because I couldn’t imagine life without her.

The second, Laura, was a childhood friend. We bragged that our mothers had been pregnant together, and wondered if one day we would be, too. We had spats, but our friendship felt stronger than any of the problems that could tear it apart.

And then I invited a new girlfriend to visit a spa with me. I didn’t ask Laura, for two reasons — she was rude to waitresses and I was always embarrassed by her behaviour, and I knew she couldn’t afford it. I didn’t even tell her I was going. But when she found out, we had one of those screaming, blaming, gut-wrenching fights, where you dig up stuff from decades before and hurl it with pinpoint accuracy. Afterwards, spent, we held each other and cried, vowing never to do anything so hateful again.

But nothing could put that Humpty-Dumpty of a friendship back together again. All she could talk about was my betrayal. Her anger was so palpable that the friendship began to feel like a dead weight instead of a state of grace. Finally we stopped speaking to each other.

I missed her so desperately that I could hardly get out of bed. The yearning in my heart was paralysing. This bond, built on trust, admiration and mutuality, was shattered, and it made me re-examine every relationship I had. Nothing seemed secure anymore, nothing seemed real.

And yet because this wasn’t a break-up with a boyfriend, or a divorce that came out of the blue, everyone seemed to want me to “get over it”. But this was harder than any break-up I had experienced; in truth, there is always a level of danger with a man, as if we expect them to break our hearts. But we imagine that our women friends will be with us to the end, no matter what, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. We come to adore our girlfriends in a way that — we hardly realise until something goes wrong — mirrors a love affair, with all the inherent risk and struggle, but without the sex.

Two wonderful new books look at these unexpected heartbreaks. Amélie Nothomb’s slender volume Antichrista tells the story of Blanche, a lonely, plain student who observes the blindingly intense Christa from afar. Blanche can’t imagine what the world must be like for a girl like that, one who moves through life so effortlessly, always surrounded by friends. But then Christa takes an interest in Blanche, and comes to spend the night. Blanche can hardly believe her luck. When Christa tells Blanche’s parents about her impoverished life back home and her long commute to university, they take pity and invite her to stay over more often. But Christa’s seduction of Blanche’s parents, and the way she eclipses Blanche in everyone’s mind (including Blanche’s), is a meditation on female friendships, and the way they can become our undoing.

The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away offers tales from writers who have lost a girlfriend. Almost every story in this collection is a gem. Some are about the stereotypical — a boyfriend seduced, betrayals of the mundane kind. But some are transcendent: the writer Ann Hood (Somewhere off the Coast of Maine) tells a devastating story of her childhood-into-adulthood best friend, Amelia, who she talked with and travelled with and adored wholly. They were supposed to meet for dinner one night when Hood’s five-year-old daughter developed a fever. Thirty-six hours later, the child was dead. Amelia sent a note, showed up at the memorial service — and then never called Hood again.

“‘Why don’t you call her?” my husband asks when I tell him that Amelia has left me for good.

He doesn’t understand the complexities of women’s friendships, how hurts sometimes cannot be forgotten, or forgiven. How three decades later, Amelia could still get teary remembering the summer I spent with Maire instead of her. It is the ultimate betrayal to abandon your good friend — for a man, for another woman, or when she needs you desperately.

These are books to share with your best friend, and then swear that you will never break each other’s heart.

ANTICHRISTA
by Amélie Nothomb
Faber, £9.99; 140pp
£9.49 (free p&p)

THE FRIEND WHO GOT AWAY
by Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell
Doubleday, USA, $24.95; 320pp
£13.86 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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