On Charismatic Friendships
I have been binging anything and everything on friendship lately, and found this memoir about the suicide of a friend particularly moving. What if we begun thinking about friends too as significant others and life partners? How different might life look? A favorite passage from the book:
“He is my favorite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am, the one whose belief in me over the years has been the most earned (he is not my parent), the most pure (he is not my boyfriend), and the most forgiving (he is my friend). There are, of course, days when he is not my favorite person, days when I would pay him to be a little less like himself. But my instinct to tell him everything and immediately, to empty my pockets of stories for him, has always been strong. It’s an odd sensation, to be an adult and look up to another adult. Not just to hold him in high regard, but to adopt his tastes and feel a sense of flattery when he adopts yours.”
Truly one of the best memoirs out there!
