Boy Friends
'Astonishingly compelling' STEPHEN FRY
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An intimate and original memoir of love, grief and male friendship by one of Scotland's brightest young talents.
'As perfect a portrait of friendship as I've ever read.'
STEPHEN FRY
'Lucid, lyrical, loaded . . . A love letter to friendship.'
JACKIE KAY
'A lovely book: bright and heartfelt, funny and refreshing.'
ANDREW O'HAGAN
'A beautiful, moving, life-affirming book.'
IAN RANKIN
Friendships might just be the greatest love affairs of our lives . . .
In 2018 poet and author Michael Pedersen lost a cherished friend, Scott Hutchison, soon after their collective voyage into the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Just weeks later, Michael began to write to him. As he confronts the bewildering process of grief, what starts as a love letter to one magical, coruscating human soon becomes a paean to all the gorgeous male friendships that have transformed his life.
'Boy Friends sees Pedersen illuminate these companions with a poet's eye, a comedian's timing - and a lover's care.'
OBSERVER
'Written with enough electricity that it seems to jolt off the page . . . Boy Friends opens up conversations about . . . the brunt of suicide, the circumstances of certain types of Scottish masculinity and where friendships fit into that.'
SUNDAY TIMES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Pedersen (Oyster) braids a history of the male relationships in his life into a lyrical tribute to his close friend, artistic collaborator, and founding member of the Scottish indie band Frightened Rabbit, Scott Hutchinson, who died by suicide in 2018. Composed as a letter to Hutchinson—who goes unnamed in the book—Pedersen's narration looks back at his working-class childhood in Edinburgh, university years, and short stint as a lawyer, while meditating on the friendships he formed and lost: "Each friendship was a love affair, yet one cut short and fractured—a vessel lost to a squall with a hull full of fish." Yet none of these relationships would compare to the one he shared with Hutchinson, a six-year-long friendship that ended shortly after a trip they took together though the Scottish Highlands (Hutchinson took his life a week before the two were supposed to reunite). As Pedersen struggles to memorialize his friend's death among the "beastly bite of grief," he finds humor and gratitude in his memories, constructing from them a passionate ode to companionship: "It was like a combination of déjà vu, finding an old love letter, and being gifted a hand-knitted cardigan from a friend no-one knew could knit. It grew like vines—leafed, flowered, fruited." Despite its plaintive origins, this brims with beauty and love.
