MA-04: Ayanna Pressley and Jesse Mermell Want to Take Their Friendship--And Their Fight--To Congress
Representative Ayanna Pressley and former Brookline, Massachusetts, selectwoman Jesse Mermell can’t pinpoint the exact moment they met. They’ve been best friends for so long now that their lives seem like they’ve always been intertwined. But after running in concentric social circles in early-aughts Boston, both seem to remember one night circa 2004, when Mermell was executive director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus and Pressley served as constituency director for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
“It was one of those conversations that start with both of you standing by the copy machine, and then you wander into the office and you’re both sitting down, and then it’s 11 o’clock at night, and you’ve been talking all night,” Mermell recalled. Her father had aggressive prostate cancer while Pressley’s mother was fighting leukemia. Both women are nervous fliers who appreciate a fine baked good, and both came to Boston with big, progressive goals of “getting shit done,” as Mermell put it.
“You just have those conversations where someone goes from being a friend to family,” Mermell told Vogue in a recent phone conversation. “She’s been my family ever since.”
Despite their different backgrounds, Mermell, a white woman from rural Pennsylvania, and Pressley, a Black woman from Chicago, bonded over breaking into the sometimes tribal, patriarchal Boston political sphere—Pressley as a Boston city councilor and Mermell as the communications director for Governor Deval Patrick and a vice president at Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
“We came here not knowing a soul, and we found a sisterhood along the way,” Pressley told Vogue. “Jesse was my maid of honor at my wedding. She was the only other person, save for a doctor, that was in the room with me when my mother took her final breath on this earth. We have been there, for and with each other, during our greatest professional victories and during our hardest personal trials.”
https://www.vogue.com/article/ayanna-pressley-jesse-mermell-close-friends-powerful-political-allies
