CAN YOUR BEST

FRIENDS BE BOOKS?
IN PRAISE OF THE SOLITARY, THE BOOKISH, THE
DIEHARD READERS
August 29, 2017

By Eve Fairbanks

Recently, reading a Mary Oliver essay collection, I stumbled across

a piece called My Friend Walt Whitman. In it, she admits she had
merely a few friends as a child in 1950s Ohio, and they were all
dead. They were her favorite books.
Defiantly, she insists that, while inanimate, they were true
friends. Powerful and amazing, avuncular, full of
metaphysical curiosity, and oracular tenderness. Like the comic
strip Calvins stuffed animal Hobbes, they accompanied her on
adventures into the wilderness, their heavy weight in her backpack
the reassuring equivalent of a human childs hand in her own,
encouraging her to go a little bit further. She was not alone.
They were not only companions, but mirrors. Or more than
mirrorsthey were seer stones. They allowed her to glimpse in
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herself qualities she didnt even know she had yet: courage,
wisdom, heart, the capacity to make and hold opinions based on a
perception of the truth. That revelation came through the process
of witnessing herself described, breathtakingly, in the texts. In
Whitmans practice of loafing, that miraculously self-confident
laziness that encompassed pleasure and curiosity and wonder, she
recognized her own strange style of being in the world, and saw
that it could be so good, so lovely, that it was worth immortalizing
in words. It also came through the joy of reading itself. She felt a
sense of triumph interpreting complicated words, and not only
interpreting them but seeing them, in her mind, expand into a
whole imaginary world, one she could enter and survive.
Oliver also confesses that books were her friends because she
felt frail in the real world. Her father was abusive. Her beloved
uncle killed himself. The boy from Romania moved away. Books
promised what people in her world couldnt seem to: they would
always be there.
In light of this confession, the breathless, anthropomorphic
adjectives she piles up to describe her book-friends ring like a
defensethe bricks of a sad, shy childs makeshift fortress, arrayed
against the potential accusation that books cant be real friends,
and that relying on them as such indicates a deficit of social skills,
a failures inclination to escape into fantasy, or just too sensitive a
soul.

***

I, too, had book friends as a child, and at a time when making real
friends could feel like too much to bear. When I was 12, I
befriended a book called Is Paris Burning? at summer camp. The
camp was an outdoor camp, full of blonde, suntanned children
whose feet were so nimble with a soccer ball it seemed as though
theyd been born with it. The word nimble didnt apply to me. I
had asthma. I wore giant glasses with pink plastic frames. I felt
anxious often. I tripped on the sidewalk so many times I earned the
nickname Eve Falls.

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 A month or two earlier, my Dad had bought me Is Paris
Burning? as a nod to our shared fascination with the Second World
War. I can still remember the tear on the shiny black cover,
evidence it had been previously loved. The hand-cut pages. The
smell, that delicious smell, part paper, part hardwood, that only
old books seem to have.
To escape the soccer kids, I sat at the front of the busthat
dorky jump seat reserved for kids who have to form a desperate,
sad alliance with the driver over children their own age. I put my
knees up against the pleather back of the drivers seat so I was in
the fetal position, and curled myself around the book as if it was
my placenta. When I got off the bus, I relished, like Mary Oliver,
the weight the hardcover made in my backpack. It felt like the bulk
of a friend, one of the hefty soccer players, but a kindly one,
accepting, who would come always to my defense.
It made me, however, the butt of the real soccer players jokes.
The next year, at Hebrew school, I so hated the cliquey, enforced
socialization over soft drinks between classes that I hid for the
whole 20 minutes with a book in a bathroom stall. When I
confessed this to my father, he was so worried about my
development that he showed up during one of these breaks to keep me
company, introducing himself to other kids and asking them to
hang out with me. You can imagine what this did for my cool
factor.

***

We say we want kids to read more, yet we also harbor a deep

suspicion of the too-bookish kid. Fran Lebowitz, the writer, tells of
barricading herself in a bedroom as a child to read. Her mother
would bust open the door and shout, Are you reading again?
To the extent that we think childhood has any purpose
anymore other than to meticulously prepare children for
applications to Princeton, we think its about socialization, about
helping them learn to function in a group of kids so they can have
friends and get married as adults and not live in cabins alone
somewhere, building strange machines and masturbating to Lord

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of the Rings. It feels as though weve become more content seeing
kids blanked out in front of the TV than with their noses buried in
a book. Maybe this is because a kids relationship with TV is less
dreamythe TV projects, the kid receivesand thus provokes less
worry that this child is developing a secret, un-monitorable,
fantasy-based inner life and may end up a school shooter. Kids
ferret books away to read in secret, foiling their parents plans to
keep an eye on them and monitor every twitch of their
development. And multiple children can be parked in front of a TV
at once, allowing adults to lie to themselves that its really a play
date.
We associate an obsession with books, too, with loneliness,
and perhaps a willful failure to learn how to play nice with other
people. With books, kids dont need to deal with the inconsistency
that comes with the needs and confusions embodied by another
actual human being. A child doesnt have to care about a book or
love it back; even a Chia Pet seems to require more active love than
a book. In fact, the books I loved most as a child were also the ones
I dared most joyously to damage. I dog-eared every other page in Is
Paris Burning. The Giver I dropped many times in the bathtub,
where I often hid to drown out the noise of my parents arguing,
and to feel the touch of an unconditionally caressing beingthe
warm waterall over my body in a home where physical touch
was rare, and fraught. Eventually, the poor, soaked Giver started to
physically dissolve.
Unearthing old copies of Calvin and Hobbes in my childhood
bedroom last January, I discovered that I had practiced cursive
handwriting in orange marker not only on the flyleaf but on top of
the cartoons, rendering the books, now, practically unreadable. Kids
project themselves onto books, we could say, creating a fantasy
connection, one with a being who is mute and cannot argue back,
getting what they want out of them when they need it and blithely
discarding them when they dont, reassured by the fact that they
are always the same, always there, and cannot hurt them with their
own expectations or their pain. All of which sounds like a fair
description of a really bad adult relationship.

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 And yet I reckon this rests on a terrible misunderstanding of
both friendship and childhood. Mary Oliver neednt have been
defensive. Books can teach kids something essential about how to
be a friendand teach us adults, too.

***

What is a friend? It seems that incredibly little is written about

friendship compared to romantic love. Friendship was once a topic
that engaged the great philosophers, from Aristotle to C.S. Lewis.
But its a mystery to us. The Los Angeles Public Librarys
purported list of recommendations for books on friendship
consists of nine books on romantic love and only two on actual
friendship.
To the extent that we do ponder it, we often think about it in
economic terms. We say we invest in our friendships. We assume
friendships take work and depend on, or are even essentially the
sum total of, tangible deedsthe quantity of phone calls, Facebook
likes, or coffee dates. We speak of friendship maintenance like
the way we maintain a car. I actually used to put friendship
maintenance on my daily to-do list along with my laundry and
bills, reminding myself to call this friend, to surprise another one
with a random Kindle gift. I had a therapist once who judged the
quality of my friends with a single question: Do they answer your
WhatsApps immediately? It was a proxy for care in our age,
which is obsessed with anxiety about isolation. Our friendships are
like the ledgers in checkbooks: what we put in equals what we get
out.
WikiHow has a popular page called How to Maintain a
Friendship: 8 Steps. Step one: Keep your friendship rewarding.
In this model, friendship consists of a) doing things together, b)
fastidiously maintaining maximum contact, and c) making sure
your friend is doing an equal number of things for you, too. Do
nice things like getting their favorite candy, it advises. Take the
time to really hear what theyre saying, and offer advice only if
they ask for it Visit whenever you can Schedule video chats
online Try out Zumba together. It will bring you closer. In

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contemporary academic friendship studies, the keywords are
reciprocity and self-disclosure.
We treat friends like money in another way: the more we
have, the better. We speak of social capital, and never stop to
consider how creepy this phrase is. And, like capital, we expect
friendship to be relentlessly in the black, relentlessly positive
and supportive, relentlessly dedicated to the effort of making
our lives look more fabulous. Almost desperately, we practice
constant self-disclosure, but we practice little actual
vulnerability. Recently, two Facebook friends of mine posted
remarkably candid mini-essays, one lamenting the breakdown of
his marriage and another revealing his inner torment about his
racism. The posts were so real; they made me feel closer to both
people. Then, within hours, and after receiving snarky comments
from acquaintances, both scrubbed them from their feeds. Its hard
to be vulnerable with anyone but a true friend. But we no longer
differentiate between friends and friends. Once, peeking at my
Facebook profile, my father asked, You have 2,000 friends? Only
much later did it occur to me that his tone was sarcastic.
For Aristotle, a highly fussed-over, meticulously crafted, and
obsessively reciprocal friendship based on jointly performing
common interests was one of the baser forms of friendship. He
identified three: the friendship of utility, the friendship of pleasure,
and the friendship of virtue.
The friendship of utility is the product of what we would now
call networking: you scratch my back and Ill scratch yours. The
friendship of pleasure is what WikiHow was going for: you both
enjoy Zumba, so you make standing dates to do it. The friendship
of virtue, though, is something completely different, something far
beyond mutual care and sharing common interests, something for
which we barely have the language. Aristotle ranked it as the
highest ethical good, above both honor and justice. This kind of
friendship, he claimed, seems to hold cities together.
What is the friendship of virtue? It does not seek flattery; in
fact, it condemns it. It loves for a persons own sake, not for any
perceived utility or particular reciprocity. The virtuous friendship
can withstand criticism and even some damage. Its bond comes
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from a mysterious thing Aristotle called eudaimonia, or roughly, a
shared sense of what it means to flourish as a human. Elsewhere,
he called this quality singleness of mind.
Though we wouldnt know how to begin to write up a
WikiHow list for how to create eudaimonia, many of us have
encountered it. Its that amazing, eerie sense that someone else is
just somehow on your wavelength. They instantly get you,
even if you just met; you could talk all night. Mary Oliver
felt eudaimonia with Walt Whitman. C.S. Lewis also wrote
wonderfully on this experience: Friendship is born of the
moment when one man says to another, What! You too? I thought
that no one but myself'
As such, it is the ultimate, perhaps the only, bulwark against
loneliness. It gives us the mystical and gratifying experience that
our inner selves, which we all secretly fear are shamefully weird,
are seen and even partially possessed by another. Our souls have a
true sibling. How astonishing!
When that shared eudaimonia is felt and embraced, a lot can
happen from which a friendship can recover. Friends can dare to
critique each other, out of concern and love. (Montaigne said a true
friendship must contain an element of
admonishment; eudaimonia is what makes us confident that the
friend wants to help us, not to damage us.) Friends can hurt each
other by accident; again, eudaimonia is what reassures that their
motives are pure. Friends can talk over great distances, or even
never meet in person. And virtuous friends can accept space in
their friendship. In fact, one of the most profound experiences in
deep friendship is to be separated from a friend, and then, upon
the return, find that its as if you never parted, or crazily, that
youre even closer.
Yet the whole way we think about human connection now
militates against this experience of friendship. We dont like things
we cant understand, define, and control. We dont like things we
cant assure ourselves we can master in eight steps. We have no
faith in the natural these days. But virtuous friendship depends on
something we absolutely cannot manufacture or manage.

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 No matter how many self-help books we read, deep in our
hearts we know we are beings more fallible than capable. We have
moods, we forget things, we fail our duties. We know one day well
fail a relationship that depends on a tangible exchange of goods.
Were not fast-food companies, with quality-control departments
to ensure that the love we have to give always reliably looks and
tastes the same. When we imagine human love as a product on the
marketplace, we become incredibly anxious; we fear we will slip
up or change and lose what we love. But we cant control other
people like we balance our checkbooks. Aristotle disaggregated
friendship from justice because there is no justice in friendship; it
is beyond justice.
It interests me that so much adult friendship now takes place
in the context of book clubs. I suspect that this is because the book is
the most vulnerable and real entity in the room. Eudaimonia demands a
certain confidence, a willingness to put out there what you really,
secretively, tentatively believe, and let it hang there, in the hopes it
triggers something in the listener. It also demands a particularly
humble and patient form of curiosity. It demands stillness, the
willingness to watch quietly while the character of a person you
are beginning to love unfurls before you like a fern in the spring,
slowly.
The very unchangeability of a book makes it a testament to
imperfection, a profile in courage. Once it is published, parts of its
contents that reviewers or readers complain about cannot be
taken down, scrubbed from the record. Its permanence invites
us to slowness, to contemplation of its character without the worry
that it will withdraw itself in reaction to our critique or
ambivalence. I think our interest in communing with people in
book clubs represents our recognition that there is something in
books that might be missing from our friendships.

***

What does this have to do with children? These days we imagine

children in two simultaneous and conflicting ways: as miniature
adults, in ferocious prep for a competitive and difficult world, and

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as fonts of untainted purity, windows into the most delightful
aspects of the human spirit before they get tarnished by society. We
got the latter idea from Rousseau.
But kids are neither miniature adults nor saints. We idealize
a childs love, but it doesnt have certain qualities necessary to
mature love. In fact, it suffers from adult loves worst pitfalls:
inconsistency and cruelty. My best childhood friend Nicky romped
with me in woods and swam with me in swimming pools; I
believed we loved each other. Then, one day, he called me up and
haughtily told me he would never play with me again. Im a
Ghostbuster now, he said, and Ghostbusters dont play with
girls. Kids are mercurial, prideful, hopelessly inconsiderate, and
painfully status-conscious. Basically, theyre frequently little shits.
And what prepares them for adulthood is not necessarily a
dumbed-down version of adulthood, just like what prepares a
fetus for the world isnt air and competition, but something
different, a sweet and quiet place where every need of theirs is met
without the asking, a place that nurtures both the strongest and the
frailest parts of them alike. In our alienation from nature, I think
we have forgotten that things emerge out of other things that are
not their mere parallel. The hard seed makes the soft plant, the soft
plant makes the hard seed.

***

In books, more than in other children, kids can glimpse their first
inkling of eudaimonia. Like a womb for friendship, a book friend
nurtures the qualities necessary to deep friendship without
exposing the vulnerable child to the difficulties inherent in loving
another human being. In loving a book, a kid can
practice eudaimonia in a safe environment. He can get a feel for how
it feels to love without fear, and to feel his spirit recognized. A book
will not tell him it has become a Ghostbuster and snap shut its
covers. Its love is unconditionalyet also finite. It abides our
infinite curiosity while teaching us that there is only so much a
beloved can give of himself, can reveal of himself, and that these
limits must satisfy us.

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 A book does not make a child work for its affection. It reveals
one of the sweetest elements of eudaimonia: a sense of
effortlessness. What would happen if we told kids the most joyful
relationships could, at least at times, feel effortless, instead of
instructing them that relationships are just another realm in which
they have to work hard and achieve? A books limitless patience
sets a child free to discover his own interior rhythms, what attracts
and bores him and what he really loves, liberated from the pressure
to create a persona that he believes will be lovable.
The very fact that a book-as-friend cant talk back, and thus
stimulates the imagination to fill in holes, teaches the lesson that
love must not only accommodate unknowable mystery, but
actually thrives on it. It teaches the child that love can bear some
pain, some dog-ears and water damage, even some neglect, and
survive. At the same time, it teaches the worth of fealty. One of the
best experiences with a book-friend, as a child, is forgetting the
book for a few months and coming back to it to find it both familiar
and wonderfully fresh and new.
Finally, it teaches the depth with which it is possible to be
curious about a stranger, and how much that curiosity can add to
life. For with a book-friend, that singleness of mind is magically
achieved with an author or a character very different from oneself.
The author is older, in the least. But maybe the author is also from
a different century, or has a different race, gender, or sexuality. The
story is set in space, or on the prairie, but usually far from Fieldston
or Chicagos South Side. Books teach a child to reach towards a
friend with the greatest capacity of their imagination, and to see
their soul reflected in a strangers, glimpsing the greatest miracle
in adult life: the way two who are divided by the very fact of their
apparently impermeable skins can find a bridge to each other, see
each other, and fuse their dreams. It is that capacity to see our own
dreams reflected in others that holds the cities together, as Aristotle
wrote. And a book does this all with a gentleness and acceptance
and patience impossible for another human being to extend, not to
mention another emotionally turbulent child.
Recently, I asked a group of acquaintances whether they had
ever considered a book a friend. The ones who answered yes
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were not loners: just the opposite. Will, who befriended Starship
Troopers, is studying to be a doctor; Meir Simchah, who befriended
the Torah, has five beloved children and is one of the friendliest
people I know. So maybe we dont need to worry about the bookish
children. They are, in fact, in apprenticeship to be people people,
exceptional appreciators of their friends for their own qualities,
and secure in the knowledge they need be no more than who they
are to find a friend.
These book-befrienders also share a distinctive experience: At
some point, as adults, many try to buy the book again. Getting a
fresh copy is invariably disappointing. True friends are
irreplaceable: we love them for themselves and for the way they
carry our distinctive histories. They arent just a bouquet of traits
we want more of in our lives, as in, Im feeling a lack of
enthusiasm, so Im going to inject some wacky Dan into my life
today. We book lovers found that we actually missed the books
themselves: the ones we had touched with our hands, the ones we
had doodled in, the ones we had put up as shields against hard
lessons of the world.

Eve Fairbanks, a contributing writer to the Huffington Post Highline, is

at work on a book about South Africa called The Inheritors.

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