Lilly Dancyger is the coolest girl you'll encounter, or at least the coolest girl that I've heard about. I don't think girls that cool could have existed in the suburban Scottsdale high school I went to, stuck as it was in a land of malls and residential areas. Dancyger was living in New York, where she was comfortably hanging out in dive bars at fourteen, something that probably couldn't happen in a place where you'd have to ask your mom for a ride. She may have dropped out of high school but she still managed to get a full ride to a private university; we don't inhabit the same universe. So when it began to dawn on me that while this book was about friendship, it was mostly about Lilly Dancyger, I was only mildly annoyed by the bait and switch.

Like most of us, Dancyger had intense friendships in childhood and in her teenage years and early twenties. She's good at capturing how intense those relationships can be and how they ebb and flow, so that the person you shared every thought with one year, is less important the next. There are several other topics addressed in this book, with grief being on of the most prevalent, including grief following a violent death. Dancyger is young and so there's a bit of stretching needed to make this memoir-in-essays work, with a friend writing embarrassingly complimentary segments in one essay. There's little universality here, these are essays about Lilly Dancyger, her life and her thoughts. I'm still looking for a book taking a look at friendship and the role friendship plays in our lives, but I did enjoy reading about Dancyger's life well enough. ( )