Bookmarked: Books about friendship

Introducing a new mini-series on the books that I'm recommending.

Introducing a new series on the books I love — ones I’ve just finished, those I’ve loved for years, and others I return to again and again.

Like many a high schooler who preferred the library to the oval at lunchtime, I studied English Literature at university alongside my more conventionally practical Commerce degree.

While the course list leaned towards the heavy and serious, my personal taste spans the high and low — or as I not-so-deftly but very accurately described in a recent Substack Note: light but not dumb.

I like my books like I like my content: well-written, a little breezy, but with the occasional dash of intellectual snobbery.

P.S. Click on the note above and read everyone’s brilliant suggestions. I also asked the same of my IG Broadcast chat.

Reading helps us reflect — on ourselves, our decisions, and our place in the world.

Share below which books you’ve enjoyed recently — what is your ‘light but not dumb’ book?

This first instalment of my book club mini-series is on friendship. Friendship is oft-writ theme, even if books aren’t explicitly about it.

Friendships can be joyful, grounding, transformative — but they can also be fraught. There are unspoken dynamics, small misunderstandings, emotional ambivalence. I know I’ve had my share of them.

I gravitate toward stories that are rom-com in energy, even if not about romance. Romantic love might be a subject considered to be grander and more worthy of literary documentation, but as I’ve gotten older and more settled, I’ve found myself drawn to stories about the complexities of friendship — the missed signals, the mishaps, the mismatched expectations.

I have friends I’ve known since I was eight. Friends I met recently through my kids. Friends I’ve collected from work and across cities. There were those fast-burn friendships — someone saying “I’m going to make you my best friend!” before ghosting a year later. (A friend for a season. My takeaway: focus on the friends who are about consistency, not intensity. A hard lesson to learn, because isn’t instant obsession intoxicating?) And there are those where we might go months without seeing each other, living in different countries, then pick up again like nothing’s changed — except we’re now pushing prams.

Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my favourite authors, recently wrote this about friendships for The Guardian:

I will admit here, at the risk of sounding pretentious, that the fact that I have a somewhat public identity as a writer plays a role in my making new friends. It would be insincere not to acknowledge that a disproportionate number of women I meet who are demographically similar do already know who I am.

While I’m no Curtis Sittenfeld, now with social media, you often can look up a future friend — understand who they are, what they do, do you like the same kind of restaurants, are your kids the same age. This can be a bit of information asymmetry — if someone wanted to be friends with me, all they need to do is peruse my Substack newsletter and quickly surmise some fast facts about me.

Unlike romantic relationships, which tend to have clearer trajectories and language to define stages, friendships are more fluid. You might have a friendship breakup, but they’re still simmering there in your workplace or in your friendship group. There’s no clear beginning or end and no terms for the in-between. Your friends — ha — don’t bandy around you when you have a friendship breakup. You try to explain to your husband, and he doesn’t quite understand. Sometimes you love your closest friends. And it’s true, sometimes you find some of their qualities irritating (nobody’s perfect — you and me, included).

So here are a few books that explore friendship in all its forms — messy, layered, and full of feeling. I hope they prompt you to reflect on the friendships in your own life and to give you the language and understanding on why some friendships have gone the way they’ve gone, or maybe how to be a better friend.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

This is the book I finished my recently which sparked the above Substack Note. From the outset it is ostensibly about Phoebe, recently divorced, who stays at a coastal boutique hotel. All the guests at the hotel are wedding guests except for Phoebe, who is then swept up in the bride Lila’s week of extravagant wedding events.

Phoebe and Lila are unlikely friends. They’re the kind of two characters who would rarely have crossed path in real life: Phoebe is a cautious, overthinking academic and Lila is a bride-to-be who attends to her problems straight away, lives a big life and works for her mother’s art gallery yet has no interest in art (instead of telling prospective clients about the visual aesthetics of the artwork, she’ll tell them that it’ll work in a wall of a bathroom and will fit in a standard size SUV). They’re not polar opposites, but they are different types of people. I found them real and both equally empathetic.

As for the writing, Espach really captures both the lightness and complexity of words. It is dialogue-heavy but in a way that doesn’t drag down the book — I can imagine this easily as a film. A joy to read, without feeling like you’re feeding your brain pure sugar.

It’s told from Phoebe’s point of view and her constant internal monologue as she reflects on her life and how she strives to take control of her life and do something for herself reminds me a lot of the internal monologue of chapter 42 in Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel (the protagonist), looks back on her life, and really probing at her own belief structure.

This is an example of a friendship which might not be a longlasting, forever friendship (but, it might!) — but the book captures their burgeoning “friendship over a season”. They get what they need out of it — knowing themselves better, and what they really want to get out of life, and how they need to change — right NOW.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

If it weren’t the intense hype around the book, I’m not sure if I would have picked this up: ostensibly, it’s about video games. It tells a story of three friends Sadie, Sam and Marx who love video games and build them together.

Sadie and Sam meet as children in a hospital gaming room; Sadie ends up visiting Sam (who is there as a patient) regularly and claiming the volunteer hours spent there as “credit” for visiting him. Sam finds out, and is understandably hurt by it — which sets the scene for a complex friendship that involves creativity, working together, and is at times pretty dysfunctional but held together by a shared admiration for each other.

There is the question of whether Sam has unrequited romantic love for Sadie — it’s not something I thought was as clear cut as that, but there is definitely a deep adoration. Sadie gives him a sense of belonging.

Marx is the third part of the trio, but really, his plot purpose is that he is so much in awe of Sadie and Sam. Marx has main character energy — he is popular, wealthy and confident — yet he selflessly cultivates an environment where his two friends can create.

This is a story about the outsiders, the misfits — in other film or literature it might be centred on Marx’s story, but this is really about Sadie and Sam. Like White Lotus season 3 and the storyline of the three women, there’s always one which feels slightly more out of it. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, kinda vibe. Here it’s Marx (who has all the qualities of the main character), but he is never resentful of the role that he’s been cast in, and instead really relishes being the support. Whereas his life was a bit aimless before (as, you can imagine being a wealthy, good looking rich guy) — this gives his life purpose.

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

Caveat: I don’t think I loved this book, but, like some weird love/hate relationship, I also can’t stop thinking about this book.

The author, Lili Anolik, has penned some of my favourite long form feature articles, such as this in-depth profile on Scarlett Johannson for Vanity Fair:

During the photo shoot she was Scarlett the star, a persona that’s almost pure artifice, a willful and glorious denial of reality, a celebration of the ideal and the mythic… During the interview she was real Scarlett, but “real” with quotes around it, a persona that likely resembles who she is behind closed doors without quite being that… The second persona allows her to give you what you want — intimacy, revelation, nakedness — the illusion of those things, anyway, which, as it turns out, is close enough, which, as it turns out, you’ll take, while allowing her to maintain her privacy in the midst of public display.

Similarly, Anolik brings about a glamorous dissection of inner worlds and image-making for the public within the context of their frenemy-esque relationship. (Though, it is questionable about how much of a friendship there really was between these two women.)

The book has the pacing and tone of a salacious group chat. Anolik talks directly to the reader, gossips freely, and goes on long tangents about side characters who are never heard from again. (Don’t bother keeping track of the names — most don’t return. I only realised this halfway in and it saved me a lot of headache.)

She so clearly is enamoured with Babitz, having spent time with her and played a huge part in Babitz’s revival. Babitz in Anolik’s eyes is a lush, and a loveably chaotic one of that, possessing a raw talent for writing that has so much potential to be harnessed. She has an undeniable charisma.

On the other hand she is more derisive of the contemporary favourite Didion, who Anolik paints as cold and calculated in comparison and who marries a man because he is a good line editor. Anolik is quick to point out when Didion’s work isn’t considered a success, points out that she was also a screenwriter and wrote a newspaper column that paid the bills, and was not ‘in’ with the Hollywood/music set in the same way that Babitz was. (However, even with Anolik’s clear contempt for Didion’s highly edited persona, it is still so apparent that Didion’s discipline for, well, everything, did put her in good steed — something that can’t ever be diminished. You end up inadvertently admiring her in spite of Anolik’s derision.)

It’s a classic polarity — Babitz as the hot mess, Didion as the ice queen — an easy-to-employ convention that eventually actually diminishes the two because we’re not looking at the grey area in between, the humanness of them and their friendship. But, look at whose name leads the table.

Comment below what are your favourite books about friendship and I’ll share them in the next instalment of Bookmarked.