The Friend

This is a book about grief and about writing. It reads like a novel, and feels like a memoir, and the lines blur even more when the protagonist behind the protagonist mentions that she's giving a class on fiction as autobiography. I loved the writing style, it was very fluid and seamlessly blend between plot elements and ruminations on writing, writers and death. Going from the grief and depression of dogs to a deep friendship that got sex out of the way early, to meditations on suicide to describing the plot of the movie Lilja 4-ever.

At the heart of it all, a first forced cohabition of dog and human that quickly turns into touching yet never soppy love story, where the lines blur of who's there to cure the other's grief. Or as Rilke says, “two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other.”

4.5
I have now googled pictures of great danes and am frightened by their size