A subversive debut novel about care and codependency in the borderland between friendship and romantic love.
What does it mean to love a friend? To Leah Barlowe, a twentysomething teacher living in a major city, it means proposing marriage to her best friend Naomi, a driven, passionate dancer who suffers from chronic pain, as a way to secure Naomi’s health insurance—no matter how Leah’s girlfriend Gwen feels. Yet as Leah and Naomi plan their wedding, the weight of Leah’s increasing obligations to those she loves—as well as the intensifying pressure Naomi’s dance company places on her to excel while concealing her illness—press against their own deferred truths and differing visions of love, forcing each woman to consider where self ends and those they care for begin.
For fans of Two Women Living Together and My Brilliant Friend, Mary Retta’s energetic debut novel is an elegy for complicated friendships, present and past, in a world that privileges romantic partnership above all else.