The Other House Book

Interwoven through the short accounts in this book about the nature of friendship, is the authors portrait of herself. Her style is deceptively straight forward, for she slithers around, offering concrete details disconnected from any permanent niche in an overall plot.She zooms in and out of time zones, collapsing years, stretching an instant into a panorama,looping through her life and zeroing in on the same characters and incidents that she returns to obbsessively. The people who befriended her,who fascinated and then repelled her. Those who dumped her, and those she dumped. A veritable catalogue of grievances and small,sharp hurts.Hays penetrating gaze is selective but not excluding herself and she is fierce in her laments. Also,she does seem to love mintute descriptions of snippets:of books and movies and life itself, pivitol moments that she pounces on and worries over like a bone.

This can be quite irritating to the haplass reader who is trying to configure some kind of order and sense out of the cascade of penetrating details and insights that Hay writes about with a clinical verging on brutal passion. She is quite ruthless in her assessments. "These dramatists. How they set us up." she observes dryly. "A few tears came to my eyes, for what they're worth. Some sympathy, for what it's worth. But in general I felt calm...not exactly out of danger,but uninvolved and unalarmed."

Who could care about such a detached person? Hay is a disparaging of herself as she is of her friends, and I found myself agreeing with her as she formulated the key questions. What makes a friendship and what are the deal breakers? What does it take to be " a good and lasting friend"?
Hay questions the nature of authenticity, shocked by each instance of hypocrisy and disloyalty, mercilessly documenting her own.

By the end end of the book I had to admit that what I disliked about EH were the things I deplore in myself, when I am not under their influence. Anger,obbsession, stifled resentment, steadfast ignorance of unpalatable truths that if acknowleged would be explosive, carelessness, and that ingrained expectation and even tolerance of a certain level of abuse, a fondness for ambiguity.

"Maybe this is the truth: things don't get old and disappear, they remain in hiding and reappear." Hay concludes before admitting after all to being " an emotional bag lady gragging along old friendships, old failings...and using them to keep myself warm in a shabby sort of way."

I was not comfortable in Hay's convoluted overly self-conscious world, but I recognize it's terrain and salute her brilliance in the organization and presentation of the material, so exasperating as to read, but in hindesight bestowing both a vivid immediacy and underlying structure. Maybe I will be able to be a better friend on account of reading this book.