My Brilliant Friends

Starred review from December 1, 2018
In both subject and style, My Brilliant Friends is a tough book. A triptych of sorts, it tells the stories of Miller's friendships with three second-wave feminists?Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook?all of whom died in the early aughts from suicide, a brain hemorrhage, and cancer, respectively. Friendships are mutual affairs, but Miller is the one to tell these stories because, quite simply, her friends cannot. As though to acknowledge the necessary partiality of her account, the prose is full of contingencies. Sentences offer chains of clauses that explain, reconsider, speculate. In another book this might be frustrating, but here it serves a sincere effort to explore the reciprocity, relationality, and relativity of friendship. Miller supplements her own observations about, for example, the uneven exchange of gifts between her and Heilbrun, with excerpts and anecdotes from the writings and lives of Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and others. Before writing this book, Miller was herself diagnosed with cancer, and she writes knowing that it might be her last. She describes the work as a reprieve. But it is also a stunning elegy to the intimacy of friendships among women and a book in which closeness is felt through the act of thinking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)