The Friend: A Novel

"Interestingly, this book was published in America in February 2018. It was written before Me Too but came out about six months after the Weinstein story broke. The main relationship in the book is a triangle. A woman writer has had this very long-term friendship with a problematic older male writer. At the beginning of the book, he commits suicide. He doesn’t leave a note, and the only instruction that he’s left is that he wants our narrator to take care of his Great Dane. Unfortunately, she’s in a tiny Manhattan apartment, and she’s not allowed to have a dog. The dog is in mourning for his master, and so is she. She and this dog are heartbroken. It’s a love triangle, a grief triangle, between the three of them. It becomes about her thinking about her friendship with this man who she knows has, quite unashamedly, slept with lots of his students. It was consensual, but there’s a power differential—he was a professor. He would say, ‘Teaching is erotic. This just happens.’ She confesses she actually slept with him too, but at the very beginning of their relationship. He’s had multiple wives and affairs. I remember reading it and checking the publication date thinking, ‘Wait! This can’t have been written before Me Too, but it’s straight into that debate.’ Sigrid has a lot of links with Angela Carter, in that neither of these writers is toeing the party line. Sigrid is unafraid to ask questions. Her narrator dearly loved this friend, and she’s not sure whether to condemn him or not. The narrator in the book has plenty to say about very judgy millennial and Gen Z students not wanting to encounter artists that they think are immoral. Like Angela Carter she has a lot of interesting things to say about the personal and the political. Can you separate the artist from the art? Can you separate the teacher from the seducer? And because the narrator has such mixed feelings about this man, he’s quite charismatic on the page. It’s a complicated book. It raises a lot of questions. I had lots of debates with my friends who’ve read it, about whether or not she lets the male writer get away with too much. You may see the dog on the cover and ask, ‘Is this a feminist novel?’ But yes, I would argue it is. There are a number of reasons we wanted to include it as one of our Five Gold Reads. We publish a lot of English writers from around the world. Sigrid is American, so it felt good to have an American writer on the list. Sigrid’s first novel was published in the UK in the early 1990s, and she hadn’t been published here since. We published The Friend in 2018. It was her seventh book. I think that’s something we do well. We pick up writers who are mid-career and maybe haven’t been published in this country for a long time or maybe need a reinvention. Again, we see things differently sometimes."