On Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, learning to love the place that you’re from and the beauty of female friendship

The first time I watched Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), I was fourteen and thought I was the coolest person alive because I wore fishnet tights and went to gigs without my dad trailing along behind me. A coming-of-age film about the complexities of growing up and moving on whilst juggling everything being a teenager throws at you (love, relationships, big life decisions), on first watch I can’t say I related to any aspect of the film because my experiences of the world were incredibly limited due to my age. However, as I’ve grown older and in turn collected experiences in the same way people might collect coins or stamps, there are a few themes that have started to become more relatable for me personally. Most notably Lady Bird’s (played by Saoirse Ronan) relationship with the place she’s from, her inability to like a nice person (although I’m better at that now than I was at 15) and in some ways, her relationship with her parents really stick out.

I grew up in a relatively small town (the population is just less than 20,000 people) on the outskirts of Leeds. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone, as in so small that you will almost definitely bump into old teachers and people you’ve not seen in donkeys in the local supermarket.  I’m grateful to have grown up in what is considered a (more than) nice area but I’m a firm believer in the idea that people grow out of places because I certainly did (or so I thought). I love where I’m from, the fact my accent has remained incredibly strong despite years of being surrounded by others from elsewhere but I’ve exhausted everything it has to offer; the old men’s pub that everyone from school frequents when they come back from uni, the park with the curry house in the centre of it and the same conversations with the same people I’ve known for 15 years – of course I’ll keep coming back to it, I just needed to get away from the sameness of it all,  much like Lady Bird does in the movie.

When it came to picking universities I might want to go to back at the start of 2021, my decisions were nowhere near as big or as rash as the ones Lady Bird makes. I knew I wanted to be close to home but not so close that it felt as though I had no independence, I had talked for years about moving to Manchester. I loved the busyness of it, its fit to bursting live music scene, the coolness of the Northern Quarter etc etc. It had all of these things that home didn’t and most of all, it meant a fresh start somewhere no one knew me. I had ultimately ended up living here by total accident having been rejected from Sheffield University on A-Level results day and at first, I despised it. I spent my first three months miserable and wanting to go home all of the time; I hated the hugeness of the city even though this was something I craved before I moved, I couldn’t understand why barely anyone I met sounded like me even though we were in one of the biggest cities in the north – everyone was southern and much posher than me, all I wished for was the comfort of home. It was during this time that I must’ve watched Lady Bird a further 5 or 6 times and it was then I finally felt connected to the titular character; I saw myself in the scenes where she leaves for uni knowing her mother’s attitude towards this move to the other side of the country and it made my chest burn.

A central theme to the film is Lady Bird’s relationship with her parents. I’ve always had an incredibly close relationship with both of mine except for a period when I was 17 and in a relationship that admittedly, turned me into a selfish, spoilt brat. Outside of pandemic restrictions, I’d spend every second I possibly could away in Sheffield visiting my girlfriend at the time. Christmas break 2020 was the worst of it because I didn’t come home for three weeks and missed Christmas Day with my family to be with hers. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my dad that echoed the same one Lady Bird has with her mum, he told me that he’ll always love me but in that moment, he didn’t like me. I was so gobsmacked that I couldn’t grasp that I was the one being awful, I just thought that this reaction was my dad being mean and trying to prevent me from being ‘happy’. I look back on that discussion and am so grateful for it because even though it took me another year to get out of that relationship, I know he was just trying to protect me by getting me to think about the damage I was doing to not only myself but everyone around me. I thought about that period of time a lot when I moved to university, how my parents must feel without me in the house and it made me incredibly sad – I regretted all those months of bitterness and childish behaviour, all the times I told my mum I hated her and the fact I let this person that was supposed to be my partner fill my head with so much poison that it warped the view I had of my own family. It’s something that still crosses my mind from time to time but things are a billion times better now, I call them at least twice a week and go home to be taken care of as often as money and time will allow. I know that they’re proud of me for moving away but I can’t help but feel that sometimes they wish that I stayed to make up for all the time we lost over the span of that two-year relationship.

I’ve always been notoriously bad at finding the right people to like too; it’s only in the last couple of months I’ve become somewhat more aware of when someone is a dick before it’s too late. I’ve spent much of my teenage years fixating over brunette men in bands and boys that only kept me around to give them an ego boost when theirs was low, the women haven’t been much better either. It’s partly why I’ve almost always found extreme comfort in the character of Lady Bird because she too fixates on the wrong sort of person. There’s Danny who she becomes more of a friend to as he struggles to accept his identity as a gay man and then there’s Kyle: every woman’s worst nightmare because he’ll butter you up until he gets bored and fucks you off eventually (I’ve been Lady Bird in that situation and it SUCKS!).

She doesn’t mend her heartbreak in the way you’d perhaps expect, there’s no having sex with friends of friends or boat loads of time wasted crying over it; instead she paints over the space in which she wrote both their names on her wall and uses female companionship to get by because she learns (just like I did) that no love will ever be greater than that shown to you by friends. They’re the ones that pick up all the pieces when your life goes to shit, in my experience they’re always there to go for a drink or sit and listen for hours whilst you moan about how you pulled the short straw again, they’ll lend you clothes and come and buy condoms when you’re too embarrassed to go alone. I never realised just how much friends do for you up until my most recent re-watch of Lady Bird and the scene after she experiences her first break-up in which she and her best friend Julie sit in the car crying to ‘Crash Into Me’ by The Dave Matthews Band really hit close to my heart. I would be absolutely nothing without the shower of love I’ve received from my friends and to have a film written almost entirely as a love letter to female friendship is so special.  

Lady Bird has taught me so much about learning to love the place that you’re from, treating it with care as after all, wherever you grow up shapes a huge part of your identity as an adult no matter how much you may think it’s the worst place in the world. It’s also taught me the important lesson of taking better care of my friends and nurturing every friendship I have because I realise I’ve been pretty crap at that in the past. Who knew that a 90-minute film set 6,000 miles away from home could have such an impact on the way a person chooses to live their life even five years after its initial release?