Will Schwalbe: The Friendships We Need
Will Schwalbe is someone I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for a long time. In fact, our lives have overlapped in strange and magical ways—a testament, really, to the way that we are all interconnected. Sometimes improbably.
Besides being a long-time, venerated book editor, Will has written four books, including one of my long-time favorites—it’s called The End of Your Life Bookclub, and it’s a memoir about his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. In her final years, Will and his mom read together, and discussed their lives through the prism of books. It’s beautiful. And his latest book, which we discuss today, is also incredibly, and quietly, moving: It’s called We Should Not Be Friends. It’s about Will and a guy named Chris Maxey, or Maxey, who Will met his senior year of college in the ‘80s—Maxey was a world-class wrestler, who ultimately became a Navy Seal, while the bookish Will worked the Gay Men’s Health Crisis phone lines at night. Point is: They could not have been more different.
The book is a powerful treatise on what friendship is—and what’s required for intimacy, particularly in a culture where there aren’t many examples of friendships between gay and straight men, or between straight men and women either. We explore all of this. Let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM WILL SCHWALBE:
We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship
Books for Living: Some Thoughts on Reading, Reflecting, and Embracing Life
Send: Why People Email So Badly and How To Do It Better
Will Schwalbe’s Website
Follow Will on Twitter and Instagram
TRANSCRIPT
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
As you know, I’m a huge Will Schwabe fan, so any chance to dive into your world and your life, Book Club is one of my favorite books—so beautiful and I loved visiting with you in this book, which is not, I just wanna say at the outset, it's not plot driven. So don't worry, as we talk about Will and Maxey and their friends, we're not gonna ruin your pleasure in the book.
WILL SCHWALBE:
That's a very nice way of putting it.
ELISE:
Yeah, it's a beautiful, subtle book about friendship and I had so many thoughts and there's so many strange synchronicities, like I've actually been to Eluthra and Wallace Stegner is my absolute favorite, which I think I knew about you, or knew about your mom and then I also loved The Agony and the Ecstasy. Chris Maxey's favorite book. I just wanted to throw that out there.
WILL:
I was shocked when, when my friend Maxey told me that was his favorite book. But I'm equally shocked that you said you loved it.
ELISE:
Well, I think you described it as like a book that maybe your parents had, like a dusty book in their library. And I think for me, I think I just found it on a bored summer day in Montana and read it and was captivated by this, what do you even call that genre?
WILL:
It's the kind of literary equivalent of a biopic, but I don’t know what it's called. I think I know how I found my way to it, and it may actually be why Maxey found his way to it, is it was around that time when I was growing up that a book like Couples by John Updyke had a certain amount of sex that you would kinda find, I mean, it's hard to believe that we read John Updyke to try to find sex scenes. There was definitely Fear of Flying, people had that on their book shelfs, Erica John, but I think so, it was probably going through the shelf as a board teen. The Agony and the Ecstasy sounded like there was gonna be very salacious content in there and it
ELISE:
No, I'm sure you're right. No, it has been another book revelation that just tickles me, is the number of bookish women—so I've heard this from Roxanne Gay, I think Maggie Nielsen even, The Clan of the Cave Bear, I love those books. I mean, all it is is sex, sex, sex, sex.
WILL:
Those are sex. Yes, those are, if you're reading Updyke for the sex scenes, it's not the same as Clan of the Cave Bear.
ELISE:
No, and I'm shocked that my parent either didn't comment or notice that I was reading like The Mammoth Hunter, I mean, I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. I was fascinated. I didn't really know what it was, and the descriptions were terrible. But, anyway, I just wanted to talk about the funny synchronicities, of course I went to Yale, but before we even get to Yale and that experience, were you, the person who gave Ben, my brother, his first Job? Did you facilitate that or did he work for you as his first book job?
WILL:
So, your brother Ben, of whom I am just the most epic personal and professional fan, he's such a dear friend and someone I admire so much. Ben knew my cousin's child, they were friends. My dear cousin had a niece or something, and Ben was a great friend of this niece.And so my cousin, who's a marvelous person who sort of fixes everything for everybody all the time, called me up and said, there's this extraordinary young man and he's working in finance, he hates, hates, hates it, will you talk to him about publishing? It's his heart's desire. So he came in and we discovered we had gone to St. Paul's school together, I mean, not together. He was much younger than me, but we had both gone there and he was so funny and smart and great, and it was clear he should be in publishing, and there was an editor, a very talented editor who had an opening for an assistant. So I recommended to Ben that he applied for that opening, but I did say, from finance to publishing, you're gonna have an 80% salary cut. And he kinda laughed. And then I said, no, that's the real number, it's an 80% salary cut, which he took. And then his career was like a rocket. And she promoted him and I promoted him. And then he was taken away by another house and he's now, as you know, one of the most successful publishers in the business.
ELISE:
Oh, Ben is the best. It's interesting cause, so like you and Ben, I went to St. Paul's and then I went to Yale and it was interesting to read about sort of your struggling with what to do with your life because I think this is probably true of everyone, but I felt also a certain amount of pressure to graduate and perform and to live up in some ways to my education. And, I remember ending up in M&A because that's what you did, which is sad, well, it was one of the only ways to afford a New York City existence and then watching him with some relief, and also anxiety, as he navigated to, as you mentioned, a much less remunerative field.
WILL:
But just to continue down this track briefly, and it's one of the things I love and one of the things why I really wanna celebrate the idea of friendship and friends and old friends is my husband David, who readers will get to know in this book a little bit, when he was starting in the fashion business in the US, he'd had a big fashion career in Hong Kong, but had to totally start over in the US, and there was a wonderful man who really took David under his wing and became a friend and a mentor, and this man happened to have family and deep roots in Montana. His dearest friend is an extraordinary woman who's a lawyer in Missoula, who helped write the Montana Constitution, who is very dear friends with your parents.
ELISE:
I know. I forgot about that.
WILL:
So I had this route to Ben, but David had this route to your parents. And just to sort of keep, you know, these things going and going and going. As you mentioned, the, the book I wrote about my mother and her death, was called The End of Your Life Book Club. And a lot of the book is my kind of appreciation of palliative care, not just as help for people dying, but as a way to help people living. So I got drawn into the palliative world and met an incredibly inspiring man named Dr. Ira Byak, who is one of the creators of palliative care as we know it today, who also was dear friends with your parents.
ELISE:
Yes, and I grew up with his daughters and Satche has been on the podcast.
WILL:
All roads lead to Rome or something, I don't know. But, to me, that's sort of one of the joys of friendship is meeting the friends of friends of friends, and then it all eventually comes around.
ELISE:
Isn’t that interesting? And I'm sure you feel this even more acutely, but I feel like my, in some ways, obviously there are these distributed connective nets and I can't express to to people listening even how strange it was that my brother and I ended up in boarding school in New Hampshire. Whether we did not come from that tradition, it's not like we were the this waspy blue blood family at all. It was this kind of wild move based on this strange scholarship for kids from Montana specifically, called the Cook Scholarship. And my brother won that. I didn't, which stung, but so the fact that our worlds overlapped is also exceptionally odd. I grew up in a small town in Montana, but this is life, right? I think this is one of the really beautiful parts of getting older is starting to see the connective web or that net emerge and suddenly you're like, even as my world gets larger, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller in a really beautiful way and the way that people reemerge, right?
WILL:
Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to write this book, is because those strange experiences, whether it's a boarding school that for some crazy circumstance, you wind up moving from Montana to go to this 500 person colony in the colds of New Hampshire. Or whether it's your first job where you were thrown together in in tight circumstance with people from different backgrounds and different talents and different professions, or whether it's this crazy thing that I wrote about a secret society at Yale where the 15 most different kids were thrown together. I really believe those experiences can be among the most valuable in your life because they break through the assumptions we make about each other. They put you in in intense relationship with people who are very much unlike you and give you a set of circumstances that you can build on for the rest of your life. So as you start to know each other's friends, you continue to meet people who are ever more different from you and it's something that after life gets a certain patina and you get to a certain age, you really appreciate more and more I think.
ELISE:
Yeah, that's beautifully said. Let's talk about secret societies because there's something about that forced intimacy, which obviously netted some really different, I mean, the book is about Chris Maxey and I know we don't wanna lionize his and we can talk about sort of the way we lionize our friends. I thought that was really a beautiful moment, but he was a Navy seal, Olympic level wrestler, right? You guys could not have been more dramatically different. And it's funny, I was thinking about tracing my own life in context to yours in that at St. Paul's, the boarding school we went to, there was so much forced intimacy. It's not very big. I just felt like we were put through a colander again and again until we actually found our people.
And I had amazing friends from St. Paul's because I was forced. I probably spent six months alone. I'm not good at making friends. I'm more like you. I'd rather read and be reclusive and it all makes me awkward. And at Yale, I let myself socially fall through the cracks. Like I had very few friends and I wouldn't say I was lonely at all because I liked being by myself, but I wasn't in a secret society. I very much sort of skated through the top and I was aware of secret societies and reading your book, I was like, you're chosen to be clear, but it made me a little sad, a little wistful that I wasn't put into a force intimacy with 14 other people. Are all of the secret societies the same, or some of them are a little bit more patriarchal, right?
WILL:
Yeah, they all have a different shtick and I, this image of secret societies, which was the Skull and Bones image, which was the, the George Herbert Walker Bush kind of people would be in it and it would be obnoxious, sort of future trust, frat bro-ey type people.
ELISE:
Leaders of the free world.
WILL:
Yeah. And so I never occurred to me that I would be in a secret society, and as you know, from reading the book, I was a classics major, I came out of the closet as a gay man the last day of high school, and so I arrived at Yale out, which actually not many of us were in 1980, when I started. And, in fact, at St. Paul's school, there had never been an out student or faculty member in the history of the school. And, so, you know, I didn't come out while at school. I came out at a graduation party.
ELISE:
Same with my brother, it was an oopsy daisy, too.
WILL:
He had an Oopsy daisy too. Yeah, that was funny. The person who accidentally or purposefully outed me is still one of my dearest friends, and I tease him about it all the time. It's the story I tell in the book. So, I arrived at Yale, joined this, this gay group, we were quite isolated at Yale. There was an air of violence, it was a very different time in the country, meaning things like the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone were very fresh. Anita Bryant's campaign against gay people, very fresh. And in fact, there were basically no laws to protect us whatsoever. There was only one state in the entire country that had law against firing people for being gay, 49 did not and I could go on and on with that. So I got more out, more gay. I went to Los Angeles, took some time off from school. I worked in the movie business, hung out in bars every night. I came back a very extreme version of myself with a leather armband. I wanted my hair to look like Prince or Adam Ants. It was permed down the center and shaved on the sides and I wore a turquoise acid washed t-shirt, jean jacket, and so I kind of went about my defiant way. It never occurred to me that I would be tapped by a secret society. It just never occurred to me. But the one that tapped me has a unique charge that it's set for itself. It's one of the oldest secret societies. It's in one of those massive stone tombs outside of campus where there are no windows you can see into. So you don't know what goes on. It's wealthy enough, the secret society, that you don't pay a single cent to be a member of it and it set its charge to bring together the 15 most different kids at Yale. So it just decided we're gonna choose the 15 kids who are totally unlike each other with the hope that none of them have ever met each other, and they will have to have dinner together twice a week for a year and tell each other their entire life stories.
And I should add one very important thing too, which is the day that Yale admitted women, this secret society admitted women. So it was totally co-ed. And, I, at the time was working as an AIDS activist. I was spending time doing things for gay men's health crisis in New York even though I was at Yale, I was working on the nascent AIDS project, New Haven AIDS hotline. So I had my school life, but I also had this very serious life outside of school. So I was gonna have like very little tolerance or patience for anything that worked my nerves. And I arrive at this thing and there was a bunch of great kids, and this one super loud, obnoxious jock named Chris Maxey. And that's why I called the book We Should Not Be Friends, is I decided like we should not be friends, this is not gonna work. I don't wanna have anything to do with this guy and we became friends and, and over the last 40 years, he's become one of the most important people in my life. I love this guy.
ELISE:
I just wanna take one quick detour into your work just to remind people of what was going on with AIDS in some ways, as a almost a third character in this book, this drumbeat of fear and endless mourn in grief, you write: “The writer, Andrew Holleran, described living as a gay man in the 1980s as being like attending ‘a very nice dinner party with friends, except some of them were taken out and shot while the rest of us were expected to go on eating.’ Years later, when I tried to tell Maxie what my life was like in the years right after graduation, I talked about the staggering number of people I knew who died from. But I did make sure to emphasize that the decade was also like a very nice party. I was enraged and worried and grieving, but I also had fun with friends and took holidays, read books, and saw movies.”
And I don't know if Covid for you, maybe the very, very early days, I know you're in New York, but this so much right, of your so many years of not even understanding how it was transmitted. Only that it was primarily affecting gay men. I can't imagine. Do you feel like you could possibly in a lifetime work that out of your body, that anxiety and grief?
WILL:
No. I can't, and to some degree, a fair amount of this book, you're right, AIDS is almost like a third character and it's because I'm still working my way through it. every day. Covid did bring back some very strong feelings, but it also brought with it a really intense sadness. Because it made very clear the memory of going through this horrific, cataclysmic tragic, tragic, and horrible thing, essentially alone. It reminded of, there was a blackout a couple of years ago that only affected a small part of Manhattan for some reason, it was the area around Lincoln Center, and so Lincoln Center was absolutely dark. There wasn't a light on the, nothing was working. The subways, everything. It was catastrophe and 10 blocks away, people are in restaurants and carrying on with their things and, and everything's fine. COVID, at least as a nation, we were seemingly to go through it together before we started to like blow apart and yeah, get back to our usual to divides.
But the thing that was, so, one of the things that was so horrific about AIDS was that feeling of going through it alone or alone in tandem with such a small number of people. And that was one of the things, I would be at Yale, I as a college student, and I would take my classes and do this and that, and then I would go to the AIDS project, New Haven hotline, and try to say something useful to someone sobbing on the other end of the phone because they had just found a lesion or they were worried they were gonna get deported. Or in one extreme case, which was a call I took in New York on gay men's health crisis line, someone literally who's in their tiny apartment, their lover was dead next to them in bed and they couldn't find a funeral home that would come take the body.
Another point that I really wanted this book to bring across about that era, which is so important to me, is I think it's hard for people who didn't live through it to understand how unbelievably long it went on for. That in fact, between the first time I became aware of AIDS, in the first years of the 1980s, and when there was actually a test to see if you had HIV, was I think it was seven years or something, it was an enormous amount of time and even then, and I may have that year wrong, I do wind in my own head, some, some aspects of it I don't like to look back on, but it was a such a long period of time and once they had the test, they still had nothing to do with that information. I think the challenge of the lens of Covid was this horrible global cataclysm, that one year later we had a vaccine for and that's just one of the great accomplishments of science and humankind, and it was made possible somewhat on the backs of AIDS research and the idea of drugs into bodies. The sheer number of years that we just had to live with it and we had to live with friends getting sick and friends dying and funerals. But we also had our jobs and we went on vacations and we had dinner parties and went to movies and I was trying to convey what an incredibly long period of time that was. So that was my entire twenties, like my entire twenties was that and the kind of drumbeat in the back of it was, having been very sexually active as a young man, including with people who I was certain later got full-blown aids, there was this sense like, just am I next?
And one thing I talked about in the book was one of the early signs was swollen glands. And I used to feel the glands on my neck all the time, and they would get more and more swollen. And finally I went to the doctor and I said, oh my God, see how swollen the glands in my neck are? And this was long before there was a test or anything. And he said, well, how long, how often do you check them? And I said, like, oh, like every hour. And he's like, oh my goodness. Would you stop poking your glands, you're making them swell. Just leave them alone. And sure enough, 24 hours later, they were gone.
ELISE:
I thought you talked about that really beautifully, that tension between, look how privileged I am, like coming out of Yale, et cetera.What am I gonna do with my life bumping up against this idea that you would be dead soon? And not in a melodramatic way, in a very real way. And I think, you know, it's interesting when we think about, there was a whole generation, more than one generation, probably, of gay men who are gone and I don't know that we'll ever really understand the cultural impact of that or the impact on younger generations. This, maybe this is a wild thought, but I wonder also what's going on now is like, well, this is actually a more accurate representation of what our collective is like in terms of its diversity of the gender binary spectrum and sexuality. We're missing a lot of people who died from aids. I don't know. Maybe that's a wild thought.
WILL:
No, I mean, we're missing these people and one of the things I always emphasize, and it's this is, you know, from quite a narrow perspective, but I think an important one is that we lost an astonishing number of writers and dancers and composers, but we also lost the audience. A huge number of people who loved books and dance and art and opera and all sorts of artistic expression died. The loss on both sides is very, very hard to grapple with. I do notice a kind of epidemic of despair among 60 plus year old gay men at this moment. I think some of that is survivor's guilt. It's complicated. And I will say, when I talk about gay men, a lot of trans people died from AIDS and have the same relationship to it. A lot of women died of AIDS and they're not always counted or mentioned. And the experience that I had of working on AIDS hotlines the AIDS caregivers and activists, the ranks had tons of women, particularly lesbians, but not exclusively in it, and trans folk. And it was this generational cataclysm that affected a ton of different people.
ELISE:
There's like a posity in my own reading, but for me it was like one of the fuller experiences of that period of time. So thank you for that, and then I thought in the context of Chris Maxey, who you chose, of all these 14 people, I wonder if any of them are jealous. Maybe Singer is a little jealous, but he's not the primary subject.
WILL:
Singer loves the book. Actually, Singer is our biggest fan.
ELISE:
But the thing that's really, I think will be affirming for people is that this isn't the story about two thick as thieves friends who called each other every time you were in town and sought each other out regularly and consistently, this is about the ebbs and flows of a friendship over decades and revelations, really, later about the ways that you in particular had tried to create distance from him, right? Can you talk a little bit about that? And the way that you had to come up against like your own feelings of why I was this guy friends with me and your own aversion to intimacy?
WILL:
Yeah. I'm so happy you picked up on that cause that's really, really important, which is Chris is not my best friend and I am not Chris's best friend. We are dear friends and we love each other and we've become increasingly important to each other. This is the kind of celebrate the sort of friendship we all have—we all have people in our lives who are incredibly important to us. Who, you know, maybe we go a decade without seeing them sometimes, or, you know, a couple of years. Sometimes, it's a decade. We find each other, we lose each other, as I write, we find ourselves and we lose ourselves, but because of some kind of intense experience, and in our case it was the Secret Society, when we come back together there's all, we go right to what's important that we can cut right through everything, now all that said, Chris Maxey has a much more open heart than I have, and he's a much more vulnerable, less guarded person.
Despite writing books and running around and talking about them, I'm a very private person. I'm a very defensive person. I'm a very anxious person. I'm a very interior person, meaning both what I keep locked up inside me, but also the fact that I'm never so happy as when I'm alone in my bedroom with a book. Like that's bliss. So one of the things that I really wanted to get across in this book is I document some of the ways that Maxey was prejudiced against me, which he fully admits and has totally overcome, but I was way more prejudiced against him. I made all sorts of assumptions about him because he was a jock, cause he was in the military, cause he was straight. All of these assumptions, about who he was and who he wanted to be. And what I try to chronicle in the book is I had to get over myself and I had to get over myself. Not once, but many times. And periodically through our relationship, I would kind of imagine a slight, and then like he came to town and he didn't call me. And rather than just say, yeah, Maxey, you know, I'd love to see you call me next time when you're in town. I would shut down the friend. in order to keep myself from being hurt. And I did that repeatedly. And one of the other ironies, and, and this is not a spoiler alert, is that for very, very, very many years, Maxey had absolutely no trouble saying to me, I love you Schwabs.
Straight guy, telling his gay friend, I love, love you. I couldn't say it back. I couldn't. I could only do it in the last couple years. And it was a huge breakthrough for me, and I think part of it was growing up, as a gay boy who the idea of saying to like a macho straight person, I love you, like fist in face two seconds later, so let's not do that, but I projected onto Maxey the kind of person who would react that way, even though he always told me he loved me. And so a lot of the book is about getting over myself.
ELISE:
But it was, I thought so well articulated and teased out that anxiety that you had and carried throughout your life, not just with Maxey, but you know, that moment at the beginning where he insists that you get on his motorcycle so he can drive you back however many hours. And you're like, I'm gonna have to put my arms, I'm gonna have to be in close physical proximity. And you're like, does he think that I'm turned on? And I mean, the mind gymnastics, which are completely understandable.
WILL:
The mind gymnastics, that was the key moment in our friendship. He's like, get on the back of the motorcycle. He threw the helmet at me, I threw it on my head and I was like, holy crap. Like if I don't put my arms around him, I'm gonna fall off the motorcycle and die if I put my arms around him, what if he thinks I'm coming onto him? But if I don't put my arms around will he think I'm not putting my arms around him because I think that he will think that I'm coming onto him. But then he like revved up the motorcycle and I'm like, I better put my arms around this guy and just Bruce Springsteen in my head. The motorcycle screeching out of the driveway cause he's a maniac and I just had to, for once in my life, stop thinking and just hold on for dear life. And that's when we really became friends.
ELISE:
It's interesting to think about these long friendships and there's something about being forged in college and boarding school or high school and before where there's no element, I was thinking about this, like you guys could not have more different lives. He's a former Navy Seal who runs a school in The Bahamas. That sounds amazing. And I love all of his thinking about education cause I feel the same. I love that only one of his four children went to college. And, the way that he thinks about transcripts, and I'm completely with him, but there's something about all of these friends, right, where there's no transaction, there's no transactional quality to these relationships. And I think about, I don't know, maybe I'm strange for thinking about that, but I am always sort of like, why do they wanna be my friend and what do they want from me? And I don't know if you do that calculus or if everyone does that calculus. Maybe I'm weird. But there's something about these early friendships that predate that, there's no use, right?
WILL:
There's no use, there's no use in these. That's part of the reason I think why they're so precious. There was a book years ago where I love the title, which was, the title was I think something like The Girls With the Grandmother Faces and you know, I don't know what people see when they look at Maxey and me, but I see the kid with the perm and the stupid turquoise acid leather jacket and I see the soon to be, you know, the jock wrestler with the arms that don't fit through his lacrosse shirts cause they're so big. Like I see us the way I did the very first time we met and I think I see our, our characters that way. And so, yeah, I mean one of the things that makes me really sad is when you think someone's a friend and then you find out it was transactional and it doesn't mean we can't ask things of each other and ask favors and do things for each other. It's just that can't be the basis of a friendship. It can't be, it can't be a favor bank and that's one of the joys of old friends and it's also one of the joys of friends who come from totally different worlds.
ELISE:
And it really can't be overstated. And you write, “I had also thought about how since college I had gradually become aware of many ways that I wanted to be more like Maxey. I wanted to stop caring quite so much what everyone thought about me, and instead just be satisfied when I was doing the right thing.” You keep going and then you said also, “I sensed that Maxey held in his mind a picture of me that was better than I really was. I wanted to be that person. I wanted to be a better friend, less judgmental, and less afraid.” And it seems like in some ways, Maxey, throughout this book is just, you know, at the very beginning he's like, I will beat up anyone who hurts you, even though at times he was maybe the one who hurt you, but this like, come on, Will, like sit in my lap. Like let me support you, let me hold you and be there. And it's interesting that it took you 40 years. Did he really do that?
WILL:
Yeah, it did, and because I admire Maxie so much, he has an open heart and he's a protector and he loves unreservedly and he keeps an eye out for other people and his business about joining the Navy Seals, which is very complicated and I talk about a lot because over the years, only very much in later years did he open up to me. But he wanted to be physically active and he loved the ocean, but he wanted to be of service. He wanted to be useful, he wanted to put everything he'd been given, his privilege, his physical strength, his agility, his brains to use, and I really admire that. And then he wanted to found this school and he wanted to be useful again. And he wants to save the environment and protect young people, and so this loud, obnoxious jock has this huge heart, and it took me a really, really long time before I was capable of not just accepting it, but understanding that.
ELISE:
I mean this made me laugh, but he was like, I'm a shallow person and he's not. Right? Like there's like a depth to him, but he doesn't have your same interiority, it's expressed in everything. Or that's how I read him.
WILL:
To be fair, at that moment in the book, and I love that you cited that cause it's one of my favorite moments. It may be my single favorite, it's a conversation we had just a couple years ago where we're like, we realized that even after almost 40 years, we don't know each other that well. And we come to the realization that there's not that much to know that we're actually both very shallow people, and we celebrate that fact. Like it is kind of what you see is what you get with both of us, and that's part of the reason we're friends is, you know, there's sometimes they say still waters run deep, but sometimes they don't.
ELISE:
He's simple, but not like there’s an incredible amount of depth.
WILL:
It's also funny too because, we just, we enjoy thing, but he doesn't have many of the hangups that I have, like one theme as you cited in the book is I actually really don't like to touch people. Like, I don't like it. I don't, I don't like to hug. I barely like to shake hands. I kinda like to nod in people's general direction. Whenever I see Maxey, he gives me this enormous bear hug, which I hate, his wife Pam does it, and now his kids have started doing it. They're like, gimme hugs. And I'm like, I really hate that, but they insist. I don't think that I let your brother hug me. I think I shake his hand.
ELISE:
I don't think Ben likes, he doesn't like physical affection either, so I don't think he likes very much. I don't think, I don't remember the last time he hugged me. I feel like it's like he gives me like a gentle backpack sort of from a distance.
WILL:
That's very funny. Yeah, I think we're very well matched in that. But you know what I mean about being shallow, you could read a lot into that. You know, maybe a therapist could have a field day with that, or you could just say, maybe I just don't like that. Yeah, and that's OK too.
ELISE:
Well I think if I were to, to therapize you, which is my favorite, it's like you learn to, in some ways, give yourself with abandon and potentially like life-threatening repercussions, but to otherwise, like physically hold yourself back. I think it's a restraint. I mean it might be since birth, but I think it's probably also part of this conditioning. Right? Or at least that's how I observed my brother. Like just that awareness. Like you mentioned the best little boy in the world, right? Like the performative perfectionism to keep yourself safe for boundary.
WILL:
That's very true. That book spoke to me very deeply as a young person when I read it and later, and it's incredibly astute to that book. Which is, if I'm elected class president and I do this and I do that and I volunteer for this thing and I volunteer for that person and I then no one will see who I really am, which was the gay part, which is the part we had to keep hidden growing up. So there is something very protective about it. About the motorcycle, one of the things, too that I hope this book sparks cause it's such a fun conversation, is the conversation about like, gay men being friends with straight men. But also straight women being friends with straight men, like a lot of times, writings on friendship talk about women and their best friends or straight men and they're like bro friends, or even gay men and their gay friends. But I would love to see more writing about friendships across these artificial gender lines.
ELISE:
Yeah, I agree. And I very, actually, very much related because growing up, May Anne's kids who we mentioned, the lawyer who wrote her two boys, they were our best friends, her youngest son was my very, very, very best friend. And we sort of had a fissure in high school and then have become friendly again, which is of great relief. But throughout my life, most if not many of, in fact, when I first met my husband, I assumed he just wanted to be friends because so many of, not all, but a vast majority of my close friends were men. And it's interesting, in a way, I think I've always desexualized myself, which is a whole other conversation, but it never really felt present.
Like I never was confused about anyone's intentions until I was on a date with my husband and I was like, we're just gonna have to get really drunk because I have no idea what's happening here. I don't know if this is the date, because to me, my most valued friendships, maybe that's not fair, but many of my closest friendships, I don't wanna offend any of my girlfriends, but were with the guys in my life, there was a freedom there.
WILL:
It's such a powerful thing and yet when, you know, not to endlessly criticize Hollywood. Although God knows, that's fun, but for the most part, if you're watching a TV show, whether it's Moonlighting or something else, if there is a guy and a girl at some point in the series there will they or won’t they moment.
ELISE:
Totally. It's so true. The way that that, that is cast on all intersexual, intergender relationships. That eventually someone will fall or someone will develop feelings. And I can attest, I have never hooked up with one of my guy friends. Never. I mean, that's never happened. It's never even been on the table.
WILL:
Yeah. And it's funny, so one of the questions that I wanted to, you know, put out in the book, Chris is a very handsome guy. He's all American. He's a jock. I never was attracted to him. I run through this little list in the book of who I like, like Matt Dylan. I love Matt Dylan so much. Always.
ELISE:
Do you know him?
WILL:
No. I was at a party with him. A tiny, tiny party. There were like eight people and I just couldn't, I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I mean, you don't really want to talk. I'm sure he is a fabulous human being, but I, even when Zoetrope Studios went bankrupt, I bought his blue jean jacket from the Outsiders, but then I was worried that at some point he would come over to my apartment and he'd see it and he'd be creeped out by it. So I donated it to the Outsider’s Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it's now on display. But then I, you know, I was like, I like Goths and Juan Estees and punk rockers and, you know, I had this catalog of counterculture types. You know, Maxey was my friend. Like, he just was always my friend and I wanted to make that clear at the beginning of the book, but it's even funny, he's so comfortable in his own skin. I proposed a piece for Modern Love about Maxey and me. They haven't taken it, but I was like, Maxie, do you mind if I write a piece for modern love about us? And he is like, nah, you're good.
ELISE:
Well, he is very affirmed in his masculinity, but he just seems very comfortable in his body. Like his physicality and he just seems very at home.
WILL:
Yes. And he has, you know, women friends and he’s just a very comfortable in his skin.
ELISE:
Well, I loved it and I'm with you. I think it's so many worlds untapped, not only in in books and music, but I think that there is still this cultural reservation or this idea that men and women can't be alone together without an element of sexuality that drives me personally bonkers. And so I'm all about mainstreaming that idea. Before, before we go, this part also struck me because like you, you know, you write about how you introduced him as your friend Chris Maxey, the Navy Seal, which is like fascinating and in of itself, right? As particularly in contrast to who you are in the world, but you write, I thought of the need so many of us have to lionize the people in our lives, introducing them to others by what they do and not who they are. If our friends do amazing things with their lives, it's as if that makes us amazing too, reflective glory. Why isn't it enough that our friends are just our friends? And I thought that was so true and culturally, it's still our first instinct, like I find myself doing it all the time. Then I try to catch myself. What do you do? It's the primary piece of context, how do we change that?
WILL:
Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's very American because traveling in France, in particular, they're horrified by it. Like, you don't ask people what they do, as I understand it. Someone may come and correct me, but as I understand it, you don't volunteer what you do and you don't ask what you do. Now, granted, a lot of people in in France knew each other from a very early age. They have that marvelous crash system. So there's other things going on, but I consider it an American Vice. And, there's an even worse layer to it, which is not only do we tend to say, you know, here's my friend Dave, instead of just saying he's an architect. So here's my friend Dave. He's the most amazing architect, or he's a brilliant architect, he's, you know, one of the greatest architects you'll ever meet. I think what Dave winds up feeling is, everyone has imposter syndrome. So even if he is gonna feel like it, but he probably isn't. He's Dave. Right? And so I think it makes, you know, you had brought up earlier this sense of transactionality and how. friendships without transactionality. And I think when we introduce people by what they do and mention how good they are at what they do, we are saying to the world that we value people for what they accomplish and what they can do for us. And my goal in introducing friends now, and I'm actually pretty good at it and cause I really practice it, is I introduced people. A character trait or an interest. So I might say, I want you to meet Dave. He's so loyal that once when the following thing happened, he did this. Or I want you to meet my dear friend Ben. He's obsessed with birding. He just got back from Madagascar, you know, or I want you to meet, you know, Eddie. He makes lemon meringue pie that has the stiffest meringue peaks I've ever seen. And actually people enjoy that. They're like, oh my god, lemon pie, I love it. Or birding. That's interesting. Tell me about that. Loyalty is such an important trait to me, so we should love our friends for who they are, not what they are. because what you do can change. You can lose your job, you can be fired, but who you are doesn't change.
And one of the other points that I really, really want to get across in this book is I believe we can be friends with so many more people than we think, so many more different kinds of people, and it's a really important caveat. They need to share our values. We can't be friends with everyone because we will find people in life who do not share our values. And we may be very close to them in all sorts of ways. We may have gone to the same schools and grown up in the same neighborhoods. On paper, we may look like pals, but I think a lot more people share our values than we think do. And that's what I discovered with Chris Maxey at one point. I talked about the Maxey Code. I love his values, and the school I love, the school's an amazing place and he's imbuing these values and kids and I think it's a funny thing to say, but there's one part of the book that makes me cry and it's not a part I wrote. It's a part Maxey wrote and it's about a kayak trip that and a kid who hates him. because the kid is gay, and the kid makes all sorts of assumptions about who Maxey is, based on all the same external assumptions that I made. And the kid finds out that Maxey is this awesome, loving, supportive guy who has a dear friend who's gay, and it cracks the kid open in a way.
ELISE:
I love that part too. Well thank you Will. This was such a pleasure.
WILL:
Oh, thank you so much. I'm so happy we're friends.
ELISE:
I love Will Schwalbe and I love the way that our lives improbably truly, have overlapped and intersected in so many different and strange ways. And he is one of those people, as you can probably tell, who is delightful and who you can just drop in to a level of intimacy with, regardless of when you last saw him. Even as much as he maintains that intimacy for him is hard. He writes, at the end, “I thought about how Maxey and I had started on such different paths. His talents were physical, and he loved to compete. His whole life had steered him toward other people: Only around them could he be peak Maxey. He’d also lost a third of his family as a child, only later finding the clan he craved. I was a kid who’d lived largely inside my head, scared of spending too much time with others in case they got to know the part of me I felt I couldn’t reveal. So I hid in plain sight, spending endless hours with others but only comfortable in my room, alone, or with one or two carefully chosen friends. Then, just a few years after I came out, being with people took on a whole new cast when sex began to equal death. Nothing was safer than a book.” What I think is really beautiful about this book, We Should Not Be Friends, is that you’ll find yourself in there, whether you’re Maxey or you’re Will or you’re one of the other characters who drop in on their lives. It’s a really beautiful example of two people who couldn’t seem more opposite finding so much in common. Thank you so much for listening.
