Nine books about female friendship in every decade of life

Michelle Herman's latest book is the essay collection If You Say So. Her books include three earlier essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life.

At Electric Lit Herman tagged "a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life." One title on the list:

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

This is a short, fierce novel sharply focused on a friendship (just as Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, was). The two women in What Are You Going Through, both writers, are at the tail end of middle age—rough waters for us all. They have been friends for a long time, but it is only now that they’ve become particularly close—so close that one of them, who’s dying, asks the other to help her die, to go away with her and stay with her until she’s ready to take the pills that will end her life before cancer takes her “in mortifying anguish.” The narrator (of most of the novel, I hasten to say; there is a brief, wry, utterly perfect first-person account by a cat of its early, terrible life) reckons with the knowledge that saying yes and saying no are both morally perilous. Empathy, love—friendship—wins.

Read about another book on Herman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue