A Review of Sorts on the Experience of reading The Friend By Sigrid Nunez While Constantly Thinking of Mom.

I’m a huge thrift store shopper, like go to Arc every Saturday because it’s 50% off most tags,

like looking forward to turning 55 when Tuesday is senior day there and I have two days on which to receive 50% off. Many of the things I thrift are books. (I know this makes me a bad writer and my karma is probably terrible as far as hoping I make actual money from my books once they’re published if I’m buying thrifted books for a couple of dollars which the author will never see (another story, another blog. I’m sorry.))

When Mom was alive, in an attempt to get her to read more, I would thrift books for her as well as myself. Eventually she had a list which simply consisted of anything by Mary Kay Andrews (an author I’ve never read, but given my recent foray into romance, may need to start) and anything about dogs. She read every A dog’s Purpose book, Marley and Me, and anything else that was even slightly dog or animal related as far as I could tell from the front or back covers whilst browsing the few aisles at Arc. That’s how I found The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez.

What I love most about browsing books at thrift stores rather than bookstores is that you never know what you might find. In my thrifting, I’ve found everything from a 1953 Signet edition of The Cather in the Rye, (added it to my 5-book collection and grinned for days. Another blog will now have to be about Six Degrees of Separation (the play or the movie) and the seeming improbability of ever finding a used copy of this, my favorite book, and thus my goal to seek it out), to a signed hardback copy of The Goon Squad.

So while I may be seeking specific books or at least specific ideas of books, I’m also always open to the unknown gems and little heard of masterpieces I end up picking up simply because of where they happen to be on a shelf or how colorful their cover is. As well, The Arc has fewer new releases than it does older books which allows me the opportunity to discover books I’d never stumble upon at a new bookseller. I can read the back cover and decide, yep, I’ll buy this because it’s $2, why not? And sometimes those gems, are indeed gems!

The Friend was this. Mind you, it took me years to find out, as I bought it for Mom because it was about a dog, a great big black and white Harlequin Great Dane who sat nobly on the front cover of the unknown book on the shelf of a secondhand shop. I do believe it sat on Mom’s bedside table all those years, unread. I will never know. I do know, that the book made its way back to me after her death. And still, it took me two more years to read it.

Then, I read it. It had been on my TBR list, but mind you, like all the countries of the world, every book is on my TBR list, and I suspect it only moved up on my list with the knowledge that it will soon be a movie (I’m a huge fan of reading the book and then watching the movie and the comparisons that follow. Which meant, the book needed to be read soon in order to avoid spoilers from the movie. I’m also a huge fan of Bill Murray, so there’s that too.)

It was nearly impossible to read this book and not think of Mom at every setting­­—­­it being about a dog, and my having given it to her (not knowing if she read it or not.) But it was also, surprisingly to me (though shouldn’t have been as one quick glance at the back cover reveals this) about grief, something of which I suspect I will be experiencing for the rest of my life now that Mom is not in it.

So here is the review of how it felt to read The Friend and what I think Mom would have thought of it, because don’t we do that? Especially when it’s a book we picked out for someone, don’t we read it and wonder what they must have thought or felt when this or that happened in the book. And even though I don’t think she ever read it, because surely, we’d have discussed it, I can’t help but wonder what she’d have thought at each particular moment and in some way, this made me feel closer to her for the brief moments I sat to enjoy it.

There is something about sharing grief that makes it bearable for the small moment during which it is shared. I do not believe the narrator is ever named (nor is anyone but the dog, Apollo, named), nor is her name important. What is important is that she has just lost her best friend and mentor, and by suicide at that. Mom would likely not like this element of the book and would wonder why he couldn’t have just died some other way, a car accident or something. However, I think she would have grown to understand a bit more just as our narrator questions all that she does.

On top of the recent suicide, the narrator is also asked by wife #3 to take the dog which dead best friend #1 had recently acquired. Maybe not usually that big of an ask, but when it’s a Harlequin Great Dane in a tiny rent-controlled New York City, a lofty one. Oh, and, she’s not allowed dogs in her apartment, yet knowing this, and knowing there are no other options for the giant beast, she says yes.

What follows is her journey through her grief as she speaks in second person (Mom wouldn’t have liked or really understood this and I suspect many readers wouldn’t either) to her dead friend as she muses about his suicide, about Apollo’s grief and understanding of his situation and loss of his master, and writing.

Oh, right, she’s a writer. So was he. A big reason why I loved this book and likely a big reason why most wouldn’t, including Mom. Thus the giant loveable dog.

Writers talking about writing is often, I imagine, only interesting to other writers. But oh, as I read, did I wish Mom had read it and therefore perhaps gained an understanding of me and the world that seemed so foreign to her. The world I clung too even when strides were not made. The world I couldn’t let go and instead kept adding careers to make up for the lack of profit from it.

She read very little of anything I wrote, but she did read everything I’ve ever published—short stories, flash fiction, poetry, and the handful of travel articles I’ve written. The anthologies in which most of the fiction is published I also retrieved from her home upon her death. All autographed by me with a note of thanks for being my mom, for being my support.

Recently, friends visiting thought it strange, when, strumming through some anthologies, they saw my signature. Why would I sign my own copies of my books? It is something no one understands, I guess, until a parent is lost--how things given, return to us.

So The Friend is a book about a death and a dog and writers and writers not writing and not writing what they should be writing and instead writing what they are being called to write because they experienced a recent loss. I suspect most of writing is a result of this. A death, a loss, a turning point. Writers are called to write. It is that simply and it is that complicated.

A Friend does a beautiful job of showing this, of showing the struggle of writing, of wanting to write and not writing, of writing and it not being what you want it to be, of it being complete and utter shit, or of it being completely and utterly not what you set out to write. All of this I loved. I couldn’t get enough of. All of this, I also suspect Mom would have been completely unimpressed by, and put off by. I suspect many a reader would be.

I get this. There are times A Friend gets a little too analytical, a little too inaccessible to the lay person—the person who doesn’t write, the person who isn’t in the world of academia. But for me, being in both those worlds, oh did I relish the moments I spent with Unnamed Narrator #1 and her aging Apollo.

I don’t know how Mom would have felt about the grief aspects of this book, and really, they weren’t just aspects. The idea of grief, the dealing with grief, the moving forward, but feeling backwards was the entirety of the novel. The questions our narrator asks, screams, begs throughout the text are ones I’ve often yelled since Mom’s death.

The narrator didn’t exactly receive answers, nor have I, but she moved through her grief and found herself a year, and then another removed from it. I suspect this is all we can do—keep screaming the questions all while moving forward even though it feels so strange to do so without the person you always used to move forward with.

I would highly recommend The Friend to anyone, though I’m betting it will be my writing friends and those in academia who will reap the most out of it. And that’s ok. But it you happen to like dogs, like Mom, there is enough loveable antics and curious musings about the life and thoughts of a dog to help you enjoy it.

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