Description

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A warm funny irresistible memoir that follows an improbable and lifechanging college friendship over the course of forty yearsfrom the bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club A rare view of male friendshipNPR

Movingsalted with Schwalbes wellestablished literary intelligence and a palpable empathyThe New York Times Book Review

By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college he had already met everyone he cared to know the theater people writers visual artists and comp lit majors and various other quirky characters including the handful of students who shared his own major Latin and Greek He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid the jocks The jocks wore baseball caps and moved in packs filling boisterous tables in the dining hall and on the whole seemed to be another species entirely one Will might encounter only at his own peril

All this changed dramatically when Will collided with Chris Maxey known to just about everyone as Maxey Maxey was physically imposing loud and a star wrestler who was determined to become a Navy SEAL where he would later serve for six years Thanks to the strangely liberating circumstances of a littleknown secret society at Yale the two forged a bond that would become a mainstay of each others lives as they repeatedly lost and found each other and themselves in the years after graduation

From New Haven to New York City from Hong Kong and Panama to a remarkable school on an island in the Bahamasthrough marriages and a divorce triumphs and devastating lossesWe Should Not Be Friends tracks an extraordinary friendship over decades of challenge and change Schwalbes marvelous new work is at its heart a joyful testament to the miracle of human connectionand how if we can just get past our preconceptions we may find some of our greatest friends