5 Books to Read With Your Best Friend
Who doesn’t love a book club? Who doesn’t love a book club with their best friend? So many books focus on family life, historical events, romance, and *cough* men. But the coming-of-age memoir is getting a makeover. Each of the following books centers a long-term, life-defining friendship. Spanning the 1950s to the ‘70s to the 21st century, these books are chaotic, inspiring, and heart-wrenching meditations on platonic love and intimacy, in particular platonic love and intimacy between women. These books are bound — no pun intended — to inspire conversation and appreciation between you and your forever friends for hours on end.
My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante
Ugh, this book broke my heart and taped it back together, and broke it again. It’s the first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, a four-book story detailing the parallel lives of childhood best friends, Elena and Lila, as they come of age in Naples, Italy in the 1950s. The writing is beautiful, but what’s really special about the book is its unwavering attention to female friendship. The most formative relationship in these girls’ lives is the one they share with each other. While both girls are gifted students, only Elena has the resources and familial support to complete a formal education. This divergence splits the two apart, opening a new world to one girl and building a wall in front of the other. When I finished reading it, I immediately wanted to call all of my friends and tell them how much I love them.
You Made A Fool Of Death With Your Beauty, by Akwaeke Emezi
You Made A Fool Of Death With Your Beauty is a deliciously fun romance novel, in which a young, widowed artist (Feyi) jets off to the Caribbean with a man she just met, only to find herself attracted to his father instead. Throughout the book, Feyi leans on her lover-turned-best-friend-turned-roommate (Joy) for tough love and advice. The two galavant around NYC at the story’s outset. Joy appears throughout the book in FaceTimes and phone calls, an unwavering source of love and comedic relief. The romance is steamy, but wouldn’t feel nearly as fun without Joy’s commentary along the way. It’s a romance tailor made for sunny summer days and discussion over brunch with your most chaotic partner-in-crime.
Conversations With Friends OR Beautiful World Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
I couldn’t pick just one! While Rooney’s best known work is the romance-inflected Normal People, her first and third novels put female friendship front and center. Conversations With Friends is a comedy of errors in which two college girlfriends-turned-best-friends (Frances and Bobbi) and aspiring writers get wrapped up in the strained marriage of an older artist and her husband. Beautiful World Where Are You has a similar structure. A successful but reclusive writer (Alice) and her best friend (Eileen), a broke editor, correspond via long, rambling emails about aesthetics and politics and the woes of 21st century life. In both books, the pairs of friends pursue independent romantic relationships, but they’re of lesser importance, and consequence, to the friendships they share with each other. Be warned: these books WILL make you want to email your closest friends.
Just Kids, by Patti Smith
This is my favorite book of all time. In Just Kids, godmother of punk music Patti Smith writes the story of her young life alongside the late, famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The met as starving artists in 1960s New York City, a relationship that evolved from a romantic entanglement to a deep, platonic intimacy that defined the rest of their lives. Before Mapplethorpe passed away, Smith promised to write the story of their life together. Never before have I witnessed a friendship so intimate so as one person could write the memoir of the other. They were attuned to one another in an otherworldly way — life partners in nearly every sense of the word. It’ll make you appreciate the friends in your life, and aspire to see and be seen by them with the reverence that Smith and Mapplethorpe shared.
Topics of Conversation, by Miranda Popkey
This is one for the chatty, the artistic, and the (lightly) philosophical — for your informal self-proclaimed social anthropologist friend with whom you ruminate on the intricacies of sex, romance, society, power, gender, and aging into the wee hours of the night. (Any Fleabag fans here?) The book uses interactions between women to tell the life story of an unnamed narrator who seeks intellectual artistic stimulation in her younger years only to be reshaped by the gendered expectations of her later life. The narrator is lonely, but her choices and experiences are endlessly thought-provoking. It’s one of those books (I say from experience) where if you read it side-by-side with a friend, you’ll have no choice but to take breaks and talk each section out.