Some years ago, my name was published in Chatelaine magazine as part of a national reunion search for long-lost best friends. At the time, being lost seemed an appropriate metaphor for my life, and I did not necessarily want to be found. This initiative was, I supposed, one of those sentimental things that sell magazines along with the idea of happy endings.

I had always rejected nostalgia, just as -- following my mother's post-Good Housekeeping example -- I had rejected what I believed were conventional choices. But curiosity won me over and I contacted the editor of the magazine, who read me the letter my childhood friend, Lorraine, had written. Lorraine and I had met as 7-year-olds in suburban London, Ontario, Canada, where, while I attended Grades 2 through 4, my father taught law at the University of Western Ontario. We remained friends after my family moved to Toronto, visiting back and forth until, in high school, we drifted apart.

Lorraine's letter recalled sweet things: our matching bell-bottom pants, our devotion to roller coasters, chocolate fudge and lip gloss. She was now married with two children and lived in the same suburban community where we had met so many years before.

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As girls, Lorraine and I thought we knew the women we would become. Now, via Chatelaine, we were going to learn what we had in fact become. From what the magazine's editor told me, Lorraine's life had followed the path we had imagined for ourselves.

My life, by comparison, seemed odd and full of failures. I had associated the unhappiness my mother experienced in her marriage with pragmatic (or what she called "conventional") choices, and I had been careful not to make the same mistakes she had. When she married my father she was a nurse; by the time she divorced him, she was an artist. I had followed if not her advice, at least her later example. Instead of university -- what my father would have wanted for me -- I went to New York to study acting.

As I wrote to Lorraine, I found myself riffling through a decade and a half of history in my head, recalling Paris, New York, Toronto, Los Angeles: some film work, some stage work, some commercials, some running around in miniskirts chasing bad guys in B-movies, one screen death -- a clean shot in the head. And as I sorted through photos to send her I saw myself in bikinis in Mexico, in hot tubs in Banff, Alberta, Canada, drinking champagne in New York. It was the picture of an ongoing party in which I seemed to be constantly celebrating with friends, but anchorless, without family or children.

Lorraine would later send me photos of herself with her beautiful children and stepchildren. And although I was well aware of how adventurous my life sounded, and indeed had been, when I saw the contrasting images of our two lives laid out in 5-by-7 snapshots, I realized for the first time how, without an anchor, liberation from conventions doesn't always feel much like freedom.

In the letter I wrote to Lorraine, I also had to explain that business about how my mother, with whom Lorraine had been close, stopped patching our clothes with hearts and started to paint. At first, she painted the house in Rosedale: red ceilings, blue walls, purple doors. She painted herself over. She painted, she said, to save herself. She said she had no choice.

The women's movement had come in the middle of her life. And she had been a young mother, a nurse, what some more radical women disdainfully called a housewife -- the enemy.

In the letter, I described to Lorraine how she had moved part time into a studio in an abandoned, unheated factory in Toronto, and bit by bit kept moving, until by the time I was 19 she had moved to Mexico, to a town inaccessible except by sea, without phone service or electricity, where, completely alone, she could do what she hoped I would never have to do -- find herself. I found the whole thing irritating at first, and hoped that eventually she'd come to her senses. (She didn't.)

I wrote to Lorraine that I recalled how jealously I had wanted Lorraine's mother, Lynn, instead of my own. And while I admired my mother, secretly I still envied what I remembered as the normalcy of Lorraine's family. In my eyes, Lorraine's mother was perfect.

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