As a writer and compulsive reader—and maybe, a slight literary snob—I generally dread being gifted a book. We’re told all the time in Creative Writing degrees to read a lot and read broadly, and it’s true. Nonetheless, I am particularly fussy about what I read and when. It’s common for me to rush and buy a book I’ve been anticipating on its day of release, only for it to then sit on my to-read shelf—only so many books can be made into a pile before it collapses—for months until I know, intuitively, that it’s time. So even if I am interested in a book I’ve been gifted, it will probably be six to seven months of having to tell the gifter, sorry I haven’t read it yet. On more than one occasion I have lied. It’s easiest to be vague if you rave about it—thought it was great. Just ripped through it. This may horrify you. In my defence, someone else would be horrified to learn that I still haven’t read the copy of Two Steps Forward they gifted me two years ago.

So, I’m not sure why it was two years ago, when a friend handed me a book called The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a writer I had not heard of at that time, I read it immediately. It was possibly because this is a good friend who works in publishing, so I was more likely to trust her taste. Or because there is a divine creative power permeating the ether that sensed I needed that book at that time to finish my own novel. Or, most likely, I opened it on the tram home to read the first page and ended up reading the first twenty. Like my novel, Small Joys of Real Life, The Friend takes places in the aftermath of a suicide. The book begins with the narrator addressing their deceased friend in the second person.