Friendship, Northern Michigan style

If Hollywood doesn’t snatch up the movie rights for Mardi Jo Link’s new memoir, “The Drummond Girls,” they are fools. In a time when friendships seem as fleeting as yesterday’s selfie, Link, who is mostly known for her true crime novels, has written a remarkable tale about eight women who become fast friends and who, for more than 20 years, gather annually for a weekend of all-night revelry and general goofing around on Drummond Island.

It’s almost as if the island, accessible only by ferry and sitting off the eastern end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, is the ninth friend.

Early in the book, Link makes sure we know that the trip isn’t all craziness, and that there are rules — like no drinking until they’ve crossed the Mackinac Bridge.

Although Link has already written one memoir, “Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on an Northern Michigan Farm,” she never considered violating the privacy of her eight friends by writing a memoir about their friendship. That all changed after “Bootstrapper” was published.

“They said to me, ‘you are going to write our story,’” Link said. “It was something I thought was off limits, and they gave me permission to do it.”

In addition to the Drummond excursion, the girls also hold a monthly gathering. It was on one of those nights that Link provided them with a manuscript to review. Naturally, she was apprehensive. These were her best friends, and she had written their memoir. Link thought that they would take the manuscript home and find a quiet place to read it and mark it up.

Not the Drummond girls.

“They told me to sit down, and that they were going to do it right now,” Link said. “I passed the manuscripts out, and they took turns turning to a page and reading random sentences.

“They didn’t exercise their censorship rights,” said Link, adding that they only corrected details, like a vehicle that was a Tahoe and not a Bronco.

Link admits to setting some of her own boundaries while writing about the eight girls.

“There were a couple lines I drew for myself,” she said. “There are lines that are private.”

The annual trip started in 1993. Link, a new waitress at Peegeo’s, was invited to tag along on a trip with three other waitresses from the northwest Michigan bar to Drummond Island. Over the years, the group gradually grew to eight and their celebrations mellowed.

”We were young,” Link said. “There were things we did then we’d never do now.”

The only accepted excuses for missing the annual trek were pregnancy and death. Link missed one outing due to pregnancy. Mary Lynn, one of the friends, died of a heart attack in 2002.

“When we returned that next fall, the island almost took on a spiritual role. We realized that time is scarce, time is limited and we had no choice to confront death. It was like a group prayer,” said Link. “But after that we whooped it up as always.”

Link writes with humor and genuine affection about her friends, but avoids the sickeningly sweet prose that is so common in memoirs of this type.

When Link started researching her pitch to the publisher, she was amazed that she could find no other books like this one. She found books about friendships, like Ann Patchett’s “Truth & Beauty” and “The Girls from Ames,” written by the late Jeffrey Zaslow, also from Michigan.

“Patchett’s wonderful book was about two friends, and ‘Ames’ was written by an outsider,” Link said. “(The Drummond Girls) may be the only book of its kind.”

Link also said that something totally unexpected came about as the result of the book.

“The girls are celebrities back home, and a lot of people are coming to Peegeo’s, where one of the girls still works,” Link said. “There’s a lot of literary tourism.”

The girls are lucky this year; they will be making two trips to the island. There will be the normal girls-only fall trip, but they are also visiting this summer to attend a fundraiser for the island’s ambulance corps.

Link said the girls kept travel notes, like how much they spent on gas, and photo albums. The most difficult part of writing the book, she said, was looking back and accepting that time had passed.

“We all looked so young,” Link said.