The Summer Friend
A Memoir
-
-
3.8 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Alive with the intoxicating magic of summer in New England, former editor of the New York Times Book Review Charles McGrath’s evocative memoir looks back at that sun-soaked season, at family, youth, and a singular bond made at a time when he thought he was beyond making friends.
“Sun-drenched and deeply touching.” —The New York Times
“Positively aches with beauty and loss.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls
It was early evening and a new acquaintance had come to retrieve his daughter from a play date. Instead of driving up in a minivan, he arrived by water, tacking his sailboat smartly across a squiggly channel in the marsh, throwing a rope overboard, and zipping back home, his gleeful daughter riding in the wake. Who knew you could do such a thing? And how could you resist befriending a man such as that?
Over the course of this rich memoir, McGrath recalls with a gimlet eye the pleasures of summers past: amateur lobstering, 9-hole golf, family costume charades, bridge-jumping, and a friendship forged between two men from different backgrounds who came together late in life.
Recounting the vagaries of summer with such precision and warmth-- peeling long strips of sunburnt skin from your shoulder as if “shuffling off your own cocoon,” the outdoor shower curtain blowing open in the breeze, an M80 firework in the mailbox--The Summer Friend is simultaneously a potent evocation of the rhythms and rituals of summer and a stirring remembrance of a friend found and then lost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A long friendship stirs a meditation on summertime in this tender elegy. New York Times writer McGrath revisits his bromance with Chip Gillespie, an architect who lived in the small Massachusetts town where McGrath and his family vacationed for many years; the relationship entailed much sailing, marathon rounds of golf, playing charades at parties, setting off firecrackers, and aimless breeze shooting (Q. "If you were on death row, what would you want as your last meal?" A. "You're probably not going to feel like eating anyway"). He weaves in other reminiscences: boyhood idylls at his parents' cottage; breaking into deserted Yale buildings with his wife, Nancy; going to the town dump; and finally, watching Chip succumb to cancer. McGrath's prose unspools like a long summer day, full of excursions that set out in vague directions and arrive at delightful places brimming with exuberant sensations (On jumping off a bridge into a river: "hat long moment of free fall is both exhilarating and heart-thumpingly scary, and when... you... break through the surface, taking in a great, blessed breath of air, the feeling is one of indescribable relief"). Through his glowing, retrospective lens, McGrath captures life at its most carefree and meaningful.
