We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship

From the best-selling author of The End of Your Life Book Club--a warm, funny, irresistible book that follows an improbable and life-changing college friendship over the course of forty years.

By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college, he had already met everyone he cared to know: the theater people, the writers, a handful of visual artists and comp lit majors, and the six other students who shared his own major, Latin and Greek. He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. The jocks wore baseball caps and moved in packs, filling boisterous tables in the dining hall, and on the whole seemed to be another species entirely, one Will might encounter only at his own peril. 

All this changed dramatically when Will collided with Chris Maxey, known to just about everyone as Maxey. Maxey was physically imposing, loud, and a star wrestler, and thanks to the strangely liberating circumstances of a little-known secret society at Yale, the two forged a bond that would remain the backbone of each other's lives for forty years. 

From New Haven to New York City, from Hong Kong and London to a remote Caribbean island--through marriages and a divorce, triumphs and devastating losses--We Should Not Be Friends tracks an extraordinary friendship through decades of challenge and change. Schwalbe's marvelous new work is a testament to the miracle of human connection.