Will Schwalbe

by Gregg Shapiro

Will Schwalbe is a gay writer who loves books. In addition to working in publishing, as an editor for Macmillan, Schwalbe is renowned for his two books about, well, books. “The End of Your Life Book Club” (2012) and “Books for Living” (2016) celebrate books and reading, while also providing readers with plenty of insight into Schwalbe himself.

“We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship” (Knopf, 2023) may be his most personal effort. Yes, books still figure prominently, but “We Should Not Be Friends” is a memoir about two people who couldn’t possibly be more different yet became unexpectedly good friends while undergrads at Yale in the early 1980s and remained close comrades to the present day.

Gregg Shapiro: This hasn’t happened to me as a reader very often, but while I was reading your memoir, I realized that I had an experience similar to yours and Chris Maxey’s when I was in college with a classmate named Peter. This made me wonder if you have heard from other gay men who have longstanding friendships with straight men with whom they should also “not be friends.”

Will Schwalbe: I’m delighted that the memoir brought to mind a college friendship of yours that was similar. I’m very curious to hear from other

Author discusses ‘We Should Not Be Friends’

gay men who’ve had friendships with straight men like Maxey. I’ve always had lots of straight men friends, but they were nothing like Maxey. If athletic, they played tennis or maybe soccer. They certainly didn’t play rugby and belong to a frat. Ultimately, it was the hyper-jock part of Maxey’s identity – far more than the fact that he was straight – that made we think we should not be friends. That’s why my biggest hope for the book is that it causes readers to reflect on all sorts of unusual friendships, not just gay/ straight ones.

“We Should Not Be Friends” is a non-fiction book about a friendship that began in the 1980s and continues to the present. What is it about that subject that you think appeals to writers?

Maybe it’s because when we are young, it’s natural to wonder what will become of us, and our friends. And then when we get older, it’s fascinating to contrast our hopes and expectations at that young age with what actually occurred. I think that’s the reason that many people love going to high school reunions: to see how things turned out. Which, of course, is one of the great pleasures of reading a certain kind of novel: we meet a bunch of characters and want to find out what happens to them.

So, for a writer, friendships viewed over many years provide a great canvas, because so much can happen and change over a long period of time. Novels like “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara and “Crossing To Safety” by Wallace Stegner are brilliant examples of this kind of story: friendships chronicled over decades. But I do think the novelist interests in these relationships diverge from those of someone like me who is writing memoir. First, I think of memoir as history, even if it’s a personal one. And second, I view memoir as the record of a sociological experiment. That’s because I think of life as a sociological experiment. The “7 Up” films really changed how I view our time on earth; these were the nine documentaries that followed a group of seven years olds from 1964 to 2019. We can create our own “7 Up”s. We just need to remember to check in with one another periodically. As it happens, that’s also a great way to maintain friendships, which are one of the great joys of life: chosen family. In this case, 40 years of check-ins resulted in a much richer life for me, and the material for this book.

There’s something almost hopeful about the line “Jocks and