Two writers on friendships and how they shape us

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, NPR's Scott Simon interviews two writers whose books about friendship reckon with how people, and what we experience with them, make us who we are. First, Hua Hsu talks about his memoir Stay True which focuses on one of his formative college friendships, and how that friendship was cut tragically short. Then, we hear from Kamala Shamsie about her novel Best of Friends. It follows the push and pull of a friendship between two girls from when they were teenagers in Karachi to when they're older and working in London.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. So I found out recently that I'm gonna have a kid.
0:08.9	It's exciting news and when I first found out, the first people I told, wasn't my parents or my sister.
0:15.0	It was the group chat, you know, the homies, the friends, whatever you want to call it.
0:18.5	And I realized that in a couple of years, I will have known
0:21.9	these losers for literally most of my life. And it's interesting to think about how much our
0:26.9	friendships shape us. And that's the theme of today's episode. In a bit, we'll hear about a book
0:31.7	that traces two lifelong friends from Karachi to London over the course of decades. But first, New Yorker staff writer Wausu just wrote a memoir about a particularly formative
0:41.9	friendship he had in college, with someone who challenged his own sense of identity, and more
0:48.0	importantly for that age, introduced Sue to a lot of cool stuff.
0:52.0	That friend died tragically.
0:59.1	And Sue tells NPR Scott Simon about how that friendship still shows up in his writing.
1:04.7	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:08.9	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:11.4	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:16.0	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:18.8	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:24.3	Hossu opens his new memoir with a gorgeous evocation of young Berkeley students driving around and coming of age with Hwa alongside his best friend Ken.
1:36.7	Let's ask the author to read from his book, Stay True.
1:39.9	At that age, time moves slow.
1:42.7	You're eager for something to happen. Passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere. It was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe at that age, time moves fast. You're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as
2:01.2	they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era. We laughed so hard we thought we'd die.
2:09.4	We cycle through legendary infatuations sure to devastate us for the rest of our lives.
	...

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