First Love: Essays on Friendship

"She’s a wonderful writer. This book revolves around the central essay about the tragic murder of her cousin Sabina when Sabina was a teenager and Lilly was 23. They were not only cousins, but best friends, two peas in a pod. She writes that they didn’t see the other as being distinct. There’s a real sense of being bound, and how beautiful this is—loving someone in that way where you are defined by them, and they by you. The adoration of that kind of friendship—it becomes part of you for ever. So this first love with Sabina is the frame for Lilly’s exploration, with each subsequent essay focusing on a different formative friendship through her coming of age until the present. One of the things I love about this is the idea that we are not only defined by the romantic loves in our lives but by the friendships too, which is so true. I can’t speak to men’s experiences, but I do think a girl’s first intense female friendship is akin to a romantic love, that kind of obsessive friendship where there might even be a thin line between that level of friendship and desire, a boundary that is sort of porous because you are feeling intense things for the first time. Later that gets transposed onto a partner. But I really love how she centres these relationships. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I also really related to Lilly’s descriptions of her girlhood, in her acting out, her vulnerability, her defiance. I was a very wild teenager, indulged in every drug anybody offered me, sought them out single-mindedly. I often look back on that young person, that child, and think about what it was that drove me. She describes her having a similar sort of drive, a similar conflict over whether she was actually having fun too. Questioning why she has to take it so far. Through my teen years, people said: Oh, it’s a cry for help. I was like: Yes! It’s a cry for help! Why is no one helping me? Lilly writes about exactly this, and how she hit a wall with her self-destructive behaviour, when she realised no one was going to come save her. Her artist father had died when she was twelve—that’s what her first memoir is about, Negative Space , which is also really beautiful. So she lived as the child of parents with addiction, with this enormous grief of losing her dad, dropped out of school, worked in a bar in New York in the East Village underage. And it was her group of friends that saved her and became her family. And she saved them too. I don’t know how anyone could read this book and not want to be her friend. Yes, in memoir we are always looking for the particular that speaks to the universal. So the more specific sensory details you can give about how you felt, how it came about, opens up the capacity for people to connect with you, engage with what you are feeling, and to find that thread that connects to their own experience. I think all of these pieces of work do that successfully."