Babette

Nicole Jeffords (2022)

This is a drawing of my remarkable friend, Babette Hughes, whom I met at a writer’s group the first week I moved to Austin thirty years ago. By a stroke of luck, we were seated next to one another and immediately began talking as if we’d been friends for years. At the time, tall, willowy Babette had stylishly cut black hair with a copper stripe running through it. She was beautiful (still is) and immensely talented. (I am fortunate to have been one of her manuscript readers over the years.) Babette is ninety-nine years old and you’d never know it from her looks or the life she leads, still active, energetic, out in the world, and writing page-turning novels. Her brain is as strong, if not stronger, than mine — she beats me at cards on a regular basis. And, not too shabby, she can lift twenty pound weights from shoulder level, seated. And her clothes! Skinny jeans, ankle boots, silky tops, long gorgeous earrings. Babette is my go-to person for advice on writing, children, marriage, relationships … just about anything because, inevitably, whatever I need to know she has already experienced.

The daughter of a bootlegger who was murdered in the family driveway when she was two, Babette’s life has been colorful, dramatic, and full of vicissitudes, one of the reasons she’s such an excellent writer. When she tells me stories, or talks about what she’s been reading or who she’s seen, I hang on her every word. My favorite thing is going to her house for dinner and sharing insights on work, people we know, politics, other writers, plans for the future. I am so lucky to have Babette as a friend, and to be able to lean on her a little when my own life slips and slides and threatens to go off the rails.