2 Books for a Real-Life ‘Brilliant Friend’

Dear readers,

Very recently an old friend moved back to Brooklyn after nearly a decade in the South.

In terms of sheer volume of knowledge, she’s one of the people I know best. I remember the breed of large mountain dog her old boss had, and the precise hue of the cat suit she was wearing when she realized she would leave her first serious boyfriend. (Kingfisher blue.) I have clocked each step of her curl-maintenance routine. And I could always sense when she was about to head-butt some blowhard at a party, because her pupils narrowed into feline slits.

This is just a scattering of the detail I gleaned from being terribly (terrifically?) close with her during the hotbed of our 20s. Back then, my friend and I felt every seism the other experienced. For a very brief period, we were pursued by a pair of Buddhist-Marxist cousins. We saw the same gynecologist.

Of course, that degree of intimacy isn’t tenable. We’ve grown apart, and grown into ourselves. She’s been gone for long enough that both of us have fallen in and out of love with people the other will never meet. (I can hear my 22-year-old self protesting from the wings: Unthinkable.) We leave our most precious sacrifices at different altars and bay at separate moons.

Neither book I recommend here is one we feverishly texted about years ago, though our tastes are still pleasingly in sync. The first is a zany, erudite memoir I wish we’d read while we were still undergraduates; I see strains of my friend in the author, particularly in the untrammeled enthusiasm of a fiendishly intelligent 20-something who’s stumbled upon her intellectual muse.

The other is a novel I discovered only last week, though it’s hardly new, and it might be the best book I’ve read in 2024. I brought it to the beach at Fort Tilden for my first outing with my friend since she moved back, just in case we ran out of things to say. Happily, I didn’t touch it at the shore. I can’t wait for her to read it.

—Joumana