She never lived up to her commitments (stood my daughter up repeatedly), gossiped about their secrets, and tried to delude her with stories that just weren't true.

There is absolutely nothing in the original letter that implies that the LW's friend did ANY of this. And it was the LW who stopped attending the dinners and stopped seeing the friend. Tee LW's friend is not hiding out--she was in the hospital and is getting chemo, and there is no question that she is really sick.

The mess with her ex-boyfriend was awful, and may or may not have been due to her inability to make a clean break with him before she entered into a new relationship. If he truly thought they were engaged and she was seeing someone else on the sly, she deserved to feel like a pariah with his anxious, grieving family and real friends. But that has nothing to do with this situation--the friend herself doesn't sound like she's expecting anything, the LW is only seeing her "occasionally," and the hugeness of their friendship sounds like it is more in the LW's imagination than in reality. So the hugeness of "I really want to just tell her to fuck off out of my life completely" seems way out of proportion, and leads me to believe it's the LW who is a controlling drama queen.

I wrote a letter to Charles Schulz in 1996 asking about the origins of Woodstock. I was surprised to receive a personal answer. He wrote:

Your questions concerning Woodstock are difficult, especially the question, "what inspired you to create Woodstock?" Comic strip inspiration happens to gradually that it's virtually impossible to explain. One thing leads to another and something finally happens. Drawing is also very important and it took me 20 years to learn to draw Woodstock so that he was a good character.

He and Snoopy have never been able to figure out what kind of bird he is and a lot of people forget that he was originally a girl bird--for she was Snoopy's secretary.

Apparently one dark and stormy night, poor Woodstock had to have a sex-change operation because Charles Schulz never considered the possibility that Snoopy's best friend could be a female. Oh, well--I treasure this letter.