Book Recommendations: On Fractured Friendship

Book Recommendations: On Fractured Friendship

I’ve been fascinated by books that explore friendship through a lens that has been fractured by time, fights, or death. Every media I consume is mostly interested in the theme of friendship: podcasts hosted by two friends discussing shared topics, tv buddy comedies that position two people against the world, or even reality shows that require alliances to survive. It’s my favorite space to inhabit, especially when I miss my own friends. Here’s my list of the best friendship-centric books I’ve read this year.

1. Sula by Toni Morrison, (1973)

★★★★★

This book is in a whole other tier than the other girls. The rest of the list are contemporary books, but this one will outlast the legacy of everyone you know.

Sula is one of those books you read and realize everyone that has written since is just desperately trying to replicate Morrison’s unique strand of magic without success. Her exploration of violence in motherhood and violence as trauma that tethers the lives of women inextricably to each other has the final word. Morrison is in keeping with the Southern Literature tradition of the sinisterness of small towns and categorizes characters by either staying in or leaving their birthplace. But Nel (stayer) and Sula (goer) convalesce so completely that the reader realizes that both choices are ultimately the same search for security outside of yourself: either in having your own family or traveling to build new monuments of memory. The narrative keeps you at bay, then with the last page, you let out a dry sob simultaneously with Nel.

2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, (2022)

★★★★★

This novel investigates the influence of creative partnership and commercial success upon a friendship in the story of Sadie Green and Sam Masur, two video-game programmers and best friends. The novel spans the early childhood meeting of the two friends through middle age to illustrate the progression of redefinitions their relationship undergoes. There is such a concentration, too, of the secondary characters’ encouragement of their relationship that reconfigures how the characters themselves view their relationship, contextualizing friendship as a communal effort to maintain partnerships among mutual friends. Zevin is so skillful in endearing you to her characters while marrying her love of literature and video games with a gentle and quick pace that urges you to finish the book as soon as you begin.

3. Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados, (2020)

★★★★★

Granados centers the relationship between Gala and Isa, two twenty-one year olds in New York City without US citizenship trying to provide for themselves on the currency of charisma alone. Their relationship slips and slides into codependency and separation that understands the struggle of reliance on another for survival. It's this sly, slow-moving waltz that circles around character explorations rather than plots. It’s visceral and observational, full of salient realizations you would note to yourself that accumulate to form essential beliefs. The insistence upon glamor as self-dignity, upon glamor as self-expression solidifies this book as a little jewel for me to swallow. And I swallowed the small jewel with a sip of French 75, and I let it shine in my otherwise empty stomach.

4. Swing Time by Zadie Smith, (2016)

★★★★

Smith’s novel also navigates internal relationships with ambition in context of one’s relationship in the knotted relationship between childhood best friends Tracey and the unnamed narrator. While Tracey’s commitment to professional dance is tied to talent, the protagonist is more interested in the security of a more traditional job. Their home lives are differently complicated and they outgrow the freedom to spend afternoons in Tracey’s living room dancing along to Jackson 5 videos and Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. The narrator becomes the personal assistant of an international pop star, Aimmee, and is soon embroiled in executing Aimmee’s shady philanthropic scheme in West Africa while Tracey struggles to escape the confines of familial cycle of struggle. The multiple timeline jumping is sometimes tiring, but the book has a great beginning and end, despite a clunky middle section.

5. Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel, (2021)

★★★★

Set in the time of the Amanda Knox trial, Henkel writes about the Berlin year abroad for two college art students, Zoe and Hailey. Zoe is still grieving the personal tragedy of the death of her childhood friend, but is excited by Hailey’s penchant for debauchery. Of course, it is essential to form a codependent bond in a foreign country, yet when the girls start to throw curated parties to garner the attention of the novelist they are subletting from, their relationship blurs the boundaries of fiction and reality. Henkel spins wildly in the last half of the novel in a way I cannot decide whether or not is productive, but the novel is a bold debut that satirizes literary fiction in a fun, back-handed way.

6. All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, (2022)

★★★★★

In All This Could Be Different, the protagonist Sneha processes the role of money in friendship in the early years of postgraduate adulthood. Mathews posits life to be a constant cauldron of chaos in which humanity is tasked with the exhaustive vulnerability of asking for love. Sneha and her friends navigate the competing boundlessness of connection with the boundaries of community. Sneha is practical, oftentimes “choosing obedience over happiness out of childish fear,” in her handling of her office job and communication with her parents, while her friends populate her life with new ways of being. Friendship compounds and questions fears indefinitely in various levels of helpfulness. The character of Sneha articulates the identity struggle of security and freedom, integrating one’s own sense of belonging in a realistic way. While this is a novel that embraces the new trend of millennials writing fictional 2008s to contextualize their twenties, there’s real clarity and love in Mathew’s storytelling.

7. Stay True: A Memoir By Hua Hsu, (2022)

★★★★

Hsu describes his book as a memoir that considers what it means to be a good friend, a title he rarely claims to embody. Hsu chronicles his college days spent with his best friend Ken and the aftermath of Ken’s murder. The memoir is sweet and nostalgic, positing that narrative itself is nostalgia– that we construct narratives in order to relive our imagined realities. Hsu questions and embraces pop culture as tools for self-identity, mechanisms for contrast and closeness. The memoir is brief and clear in its goal to offer an example of friendship to resonate with the much quoted in Hsu’s memoir, Jacques Derrida (the late twentieth century philosopher) in saying, “For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future,” through the Hsu’s nostalgic landscape of mixtapes, long drives, and going to college at Berkeley in the nineties.