Roundup: Friends.

A bit of self-promotion here.

still from Picnic at Hanging Rock

For Lapham’s Quarterly, I wrote about what I termed “the friendship plot”: stories about how your friend is dead. I’ve been really excited to share this ever since I wrote it, and now it’s here! I also made a playlist if you want to brood on the subject while lying on your floor, or something.

Two books that ended up not making it into the essay that I wanted to mention here: first, Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which is a beautiful, slim book about precisely the kind of obsessive and shortlived friendship I’m interested in here. And Nella Larsen’s Passing, which is about childhood friends reuniting in a prickly, uncomfortable way—a bit about what it means to be around people who knew you when, though in this case, that also means things like “know you are ‘passing’ as white to stay married to your violently racist husband.” There are bunch of others that belong in the essay, but these are the two I felt worst about not mentioning.

Also, movie…