Friendship Stories for the New Year

Though we often associate love stories with romantic partnership, Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship highlights the role that friendship plays in forming our associations with love, as well as opportunities to care for one another and show forms of love we may not receive in our families of origin or romantic relationships. After reading Dancyger’s book, I thought about fiction that features friendship as the primary relationship in the book. Check out these three novels centering friendship across the protagonists’ lives!

Four Squares by Bobby Finger alternates between two timelines in Artie Anderson’s New York City life: his 1992 30-year-old self, partying at gay bars with his friends and starting an affair with a married man, and 2022, when 60-year-old Artie joins GALS (the Gay and Lesbian Senior Center), first as a volunteer and then as a participant after breaking his leg. Central to his life in the West Village in the 90s are Artie’s best friends, with whom he has regular movie nights, protests with at ACT UP, and who form the basis of the novel he writes, also called Four Squares. In the present-day timeline, it becomes clear that both his friends and his lover have died, and years of loneliness are buoyed by new relationships at GALS. The changing timelines allow for nonlinear exploration of the impact of these friendships on Artie’s life and the importance of friendship for all of us.

Changing timelines are also a marker of change in Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece, which traces three creative Asian American teenagers across decades of coming together and falling apart. When Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen meet in 1980s suburbia, they quickly recognize each other as kindred spirits, determined to make meaning and forge their paths out of the monotony of their parents’ lives. Giselle becomes a notorious performance artist, remembered far more after her disappearance from public life than during her prime. Jackie flocks to the burgeoning world of computers, navigating the tension between success and selling out, while Ellen, always committed to socialist politics and fighting gentrification, helps create a community squat in New York. As time moves into the scarily plausible authoritarian tech-dystopic 2040s, the relationships between the three women remain the connective thread in their disjointed lives.

One of my all-time favorite stories of friendship is Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante, an unmatched tender expression of love between the narrator, a queer trans woman, and the titular Vivian, her friend and a straight trans woman who has recently died. Their friendship crystallized over their shared favorite television show, Little Blue. As a testament to her love for Vivian, the narrator creates an A-Z encyclopedia of the show, and the resulting book will make you wish this show was real. I sobbed while reading this and will forever recommend it as a friendship novel AND a book that makes me rethink what fiction can be.

~posted by Jane S.

  Though we often associate love stories with romantic partnership, Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship highlights the role that friendship plays in forming our associations with love, as well as opportunities to care for one another and show forms of love we may not receive in our families of origin or romantic relationships. After reading … Continue reading “Friendship Stories for the New Year” 

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