Books Matter
A box arrived this week from my friend Sue Dunkin. We share a longtime friendship that began with our mutual love of books and association with the annual Unbound Book Festival that takes place each April in Columbia, Missouri. Without opening the box, I knew it was a book and guessed its title, We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship, by Best-Selling author Will Schwalbe (2023). This year’s Unbound Book Festival had just concluded and Schwalbe was one of the authors at the event.
When Sue and I met Will Schwalbe in 2017 at Unbound, he’d published The End of Your Life Book Club (2013) and Books for Living (2016). His books read like a conversation between friends who’ve shared thoughts on books forever. At one of his author sessions, he told the audience that when he meets fellow book lovers, he greets them as “members of the tribe.” He thanked local librarians and book groups, and Miss Locke—his boarding school librarian—who always recommended the perfect book and had “the most delicious chocolate-chip brown-sugar brownies at her desk.” He then shared his thoughts on the importance of being a lifelong reader.
At some point, a woman in the audience asked Schwalbe, “What are you reading?” It was the question he’d been waiting for. Reaching into a bag behind the podium, Will pulled out a book he’d purchased at Columbia’s Skylark Bookshop and presented it to the delighted woman. It’s his way of introducing readers to new books they might not have considered reading. In bookstores, if Schwalbe accidentally knocks over a book, he takes it as a sign that he should buy it and share it with someone in his book tribe.
Will then spoke about The End of Your Life Book Club—a memoir of his extraordinary mother and the books they shared during the two-year period when she was dying of cancer. “Books have been a constant in my life,” Will explained. “From those my mother read to me when I was too young to read, to those father read us when we could read but still liked to be read to.”
I love Will’s spirit and admire his mother’s courage and compassion. When Mrs. Schwalbe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, she and Will formed a book club of two. Over the two years that she lived following her diagnosis, they read dozens of books, discussing them, and talking about their lives during her chemotherapy sessions at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In the book’s epilogue, he wrote this of his remarkable mother —
“She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose…is the grandest entertainment and is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others.”
As his talk ended, Will also shared some rules his mother lived by, among them: “1. Make your bed, every morning. 2. Be kind. 3. Write thank-you notes immediately. 4. Keep presents on hand for when a gift is needed.” When I left his talk that day, I’d become a part of his tribe and hoped that we should always be friends.
The final day of the festival, I shared a copy of Notes From Boomerang Creek with Will and gave him a box of homemade brownies in honor of his boarding school librarian, Miss Locke. I’d just read “Straight Talk from Miss Hepburn”—a New York Times article (July 3, 2003) written by Heather Henderson following actress Katharine Hepburn’s death. The article had just been mentioned on the New York Times cooking website along with Hepburn’s legendary brownie recipe. A box of Miss Hepburn’s brownies, I thought, would be the perfect gift for Will, along with the story behind them.
In 1983, Heather Henderson had been considering dropping out of Bryn Mawr College, Miss Hepburn’s alma mater. Heather’s father whose wife had died two years earlier lived around the corner from the actress in Manhattan. Distressed over the situation, Mr. Henderson dropped a note in Hepburn’s mailbox on East 49th Street. The actress promptly called Heather at school, gave her some frank advice, and invited the girl and her father to her town house for brownies and tea.
In her NYT article, Henderson wrote that she remains grateful to Miss Hepburn for making her stick it out at Bryn Mawr and for giving her these rules to live by: “1. Never quit. 2. Be yourself. 3. Don’t put too much flour in your brownies.”
My friend Sue Dunkin has just given me the perfect gift—Will Schwalbe’s newest memoir, We Should Not Be Friends. The inscription inside reads: “To Cathy, We Should be friends! And I’m so blessed we are! Will Schwalbe”
Reading Will’s books, you are reminded of books that changed your life, broadened your horizon, inspired you, or made you cry. Across the miles and years, I feel blessed to be a part of Will and Sue’s tribe of book lovers.