I saw 'St. Elmo's Fire' with my best friend when I was 22. 'Brats' took me right back

“I never thought I'd be this tired at 22,” Demi Moore's character tells Rob Lowe in a key scene from the movie “St. Elmo's Fire.” When I saw that movie, when of its opening week at a New Jersey mall, I was also 22 and watching with the closest friend I had made in what was the first job out of college for both of us.

“I can understand that,” Barbara whispered to me, and I nodded. We were reporters for a small-town newspaper, working crazy hours to get the clips that would propel us out of there, living on coffee, adrenaline, and five hours of sleep. “St. Elmo's Fire” wasn't a great movie, we later agreed, but we enjoyed it. The movie captured something of what it was like to be young at the time, at a time when Hollywood was only recently beginning to reflect our generation.

The cast of “St. Elmo's Fire” is featured prominently in “Brats,” the new documentary from actor Andrew McCarthy, a member of the legendary Brat Pack. In some reviews of the film, McCarthy was criticized for ruminating excessively on how the Brat Pack label negatively affected his career, as well as his relationships with the other actors. But I sympathize with McCarthy. I understand what it's like to want to return to a time when life seemed preserved, when its wildest possibilities still seemed feasible.

In music videos from the mid-1980s, the Brat Pack actors – many of whom are exactly my age – look like children. Seeing their young people juxtaposed with recent interviews took me on a wave of nostalgia. And since nostalgia and grief are cousins, it brought me back to my friend Barbara.

We met in that South Jersey newsroom in late 1984. I was a punk and New Wave fanatic with a perm that never quite reached the height the '80s demanded, I wore thrift store minidresses to cover local zoning board meetings. Barbara, only a year older than me, had gone to school in New York and had the kind of cool she didn't need to advertise, as well as a much better sense of appropriate dress for work. I was pretty lost that first year after college, as were most of the characters in “St. Elmo's Firefighter.” But Barbara knew exactly where she was going, and once we became friends, she helped me get my life on the right track, too.

We were movie buffs who rented what we couldn't find in local theaters, or we drove: to Philadelphia, 45 minutes away; to Manhattan, a nearly three-hour trip, where Barbara often spent weekends with her college boyfriend. We saw all kinds of films, from arthouse to mainstream. Even though we were a few years older than the characters in John Hughes' films, we loved those films, still close enough to our own high school experiences to get a glimpse of ourselves on screen.

Barbara and I only worked together for a year and a half, but we had become such good friends by the time we moved on to other jobs that we remained close – through interstate moves, graduate school and twelve years of writing a novel for me. , marriage and children and a steady rise to bigger and more prestigious newsrooms for her. We spoke on the phone every week, then instant messaged every evening and visited often. When she died in 2002, it was sudden, unexpected: a pulmonary embolism. Something that can only be avoided with a crystal ball or a time machine.

I took it hard. The most acute phase of grief usually lasts about a year, according to most psychologists, but Barbara's death left me deeply distraught for the first half of my forties. She had been my sounding board, my rock, the person I relied on the most. Life rushed by while I was stuck, depending on the memories and the strong emotions attached to them. I didn't know how to think about Barbara without crying, so I finally tried to stop thinking about her at all.

I immersed myself in my work, I made new friends. On my birthday in 2008, I threw myself a party and my apartment in Somerville was packed. I remember standing on my porch as the last guests left and realizing that I felt, for the first time in years, alive.