Group Chat: When Friends Become Family
Still aglow from a wonderful live gathering for the Brooklyn Book Festival
Last night, we were lucky to share the stage with very talented writers:
and , hosted by the most stylish style columnist Shane O’Neill.
We were grateful to the Brooklyn Book Festival for including our event centering friendship and chosen family as part of the official 2024 Bookends series. We were one of the final events of a weeklong, annual festival, and the energy was warm, celebratory, and cozy.
The venue was nestled into a basement in the Lower East Side, with low, candlelit café tables, and bookshelves lining the entirety of one wall. While we were told it’s primarily a comedy club, it felt like it could be a speakeasy, or (appropriately) a subterranean library. It felt like a secret to be shared among the friends and strangers who gathered together on a cool, autumnal Monday evening.
While we consider ourselves writers first these days, there was an undeniable pleasure in returning to one of our first loves as a duo: a scrappy, multi-genre live event — and especially one that gives us a platform to celebrate and shine a light on artists we admire hugely. Andrew and I first forged our friendship running a living-room salon series that graduated into bar backrooms and small clubs across downtown and Brooklyn. Those gatherings similarly always felt like a wink, and a secret to be held between friends. We would mine our creative circle for multidiscipline performances: pairing dancers with string quartets; storytellers with jazz pianists; improvised music with poetry.
In that spirit, last night was a cross-genre show where we had a rare opportunity to screen our short which made its festival run last year. In the panel discussion that followed, it was a pleasure to tease out some of the common ideas about friendship, community, and place-making that run through Lilly’s and Lola’s wonderful memoiristic essay collections, and our own work. We may each have diverging life experiences, and different applications of these values — but it was striking to observe how friendship and love and commitment form a bedrock for a certain shared worldview. One that approaches the emotional and practical challenges of life with a communal and collectivist lens.
…And, just like the cabaret series we used to run pre-pandemic, we couldn’t resist sending the evening off with a little friend-duet.
This week’s radio show playlist: