Friend

A New York writer and longtime college writing teacher loses her closest friend and former teacher. He was briefly her lover, years earlier. He takes his own life without a note, and leaves her one thing: Apollo, his enormous Great Dane, who has nowhere else to go.

Her apartment is barely five hundred square feet, and it forbids pets. Keeping the dog puts her lease at risk. She keeps him anyway. Apollo is too large for her rooms and too grieved himself to eat, and caring for him means facing down neighbors and the building's management, who want him gone.

The book moves in short, circling passages rather than conventional scenes. It returns again and again to the dead friend: his years teaching, and the blurred lines between him and his students. It also returns to an early, brief affair between him and the narrator herself. Threaded through all of it is what keeping writing means once the person who first told her to write is gone.

It won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. It was also a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2020 Dublin Literary Award. A film adaptation followed, starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray.