The Friendships We Need (Will Schwalbe)
\u201cA conversation that I hope this book sparks, because it's such a fun conversation, is the conversation about like, gay men being friends with straight men. But also straight women being friends with straight men. Like, you know, being friends, like a lot of times writings on friendship talk about women and their best friends or straight men and they're like bro friends, or even gay men and their gay friends. But I would love to see more writing about friendships across these artificial gender lines.\u201d\nSo says Will Schwalbe, someone I\u2019ve had the pleasure of knowing for a long time. In fact, our lives have overlapped in strange and magical ways\u2014a testament, really, to the way that we are all interconnected. Sometimes improbably.\nBesides being a long-time, venerated book editor, Will has written four books, including one of my long-time favorites\u2014it\u2019s called The End of Your Life Bookclub, and it\u2019s a memoir about his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. In her final years, Will and his mom read together, and discussed their lives through the prism of books. It\u2019s beautiful. And his latest book, which we discuss today, is also incredibly, and quietly, moving: It\u2019s called We Should Not Be Friends. It\u2019s about Will and a guy named Chris Maxey, or Maxey, who Will met his senior year of college in the \u201880s\u2014Maxey was a world-class wrestler, who ultimately became a Navy Seal, while the bookish Will worked the Gay Men\u2019s Health Crisis phone lines at night. Point is: They could not have been more different.\xa0\nThe book is a powerful treatise on what friendship is\u2014and what\u2019s required for intimacy, particularly in a culture where there aren\u2019t many examples of friendships between gay and straight men, or between straight men and women either. We explore all of this.\n\nMORE FROM WILL SCHWALBE:\nWe Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship\nBooks for Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life\nThe End of Your Life Bookclub\nSend: Why People Email So Badly and How To Do It Better\nWill Schwalbe\u2019s Website\nFollow Will on Twitter and Instagram\n \nTo learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy\n \n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices