Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World

Vulchi (Tell Me Who You Are), cofounder of the racial literacy nonprofit CHOOSE, crafts a humane and vulnerable paean to friendship. While many see friendships as a part of life that fades in the face of more pressing concerns like careers and family, Vulchi believes friendship is at the root of “what it means to be human.” In her attempt to create “a new vocabulary” of friendship, Vulchi explicates, warts and all, her lifelong association with Winona Gao, a collaborator, occasional roommate, and “platonic life partner.” The author also draws on ideas about friendship from Khalil Gibran, Virginia Woolf, and Aristotle, whose notion of a “friendship of virtue”—which he called “the highest form of love”—underpins the book. Elsewhere, Vulchi’s cataloging of famous friendships provides some marvelous images, like Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz waiting in line for a movie, Emerson and Thoreau strolling together around Walden Pond, or Madonna flaunting her closeness to actor Sandra Bernhard at a concert that activist June Jordan also happened to be attending with her own friends. Jordan, in particular, emerges as the book’s intellectual center: an outspoken feminist icon who maintained friendships with Angela Davis and Adrienne Rich (the latter relationship, at times, full of conflict), and whose life, in Vulchi’s telling, serves as an important rebuke to the American myth of self-reliance. It’s an incisive, elegant take on what it means to be a friend. (Apr.)