I met Sara seven years ago. She is in her early 70s. I am in my late 30s. When we met, we both participated in activities related to shared interests. Now we only get together for lunch every six weeks or so.

For the past year and a half, I've noticed that Sara has become intolerably rude. She interrupts me in mid-sentence to tell me a completely unrelated story about herself. If I ask a supporting question during one of her stories, she ignores it and just talks more loudly. If someone is talking to me in a group situation, she talks over them, as if they are not there.

I spoke to her on the phone yesterday after a two month hiatus and she did not stop talking for 23 minutes. When I finally got a chance to get a word in, she told me she had to go.

The last time I saw her, I was determined to not let her monologue at me. I succeeded, but the end result was that she left early, seemed angry, and didn't contact me for several months.

I'm not sure if this was a dramatic change or a slow, steady buildup of increasingly rude behavior. I've realized recently that I have a very bad pattern of surrounding myself with conversational narcissists. Sara always tended to tell long stories about her past, which was okay before she started repeating them.

If it weren't for her age, I would just end this friendship. However, I feel guilty, like I am abandoning her because she turned into a boring old lady who talks all the time and asks me for favors. A comment earlier this year about wanting to surround herself with people who would take care of her as she got older really rubbed me the wrong way.

I wonder about her behavior being related to a medical condition, but I am not really sure what I could do even if that were the case. I'm not her only lifeline. She sees her children, grandkids, and sister several times each week. I suspect she has a more active social life than I do.

Has anyone confronted a friend about this kind of issue and had good results? I've let this go on for so long that I'm not sure I want to spend time with her even if she stops. I enjoyed doing things with her when we first met, but I do not enjoying talking with her.