Jeremy Gordon’s book came to me as an ARC. I am always grateful for my bookish connections and how I am able to read new and upcoming books. It is something the little nerdy child in me will never take for granted. I first became aware of See Friendship through a random Instagram suggestion. The algorithm rarely gets anything right, but I guess on this occasion, my interests were piqued. I was drawn to the bold mustard yellow cover and the simple flip phone image. It felt like it was going to be a millennial novel, unlike anything I had read before.

Jeremy Gordon is a North American journalist based in Brooklyn. The main character of his novel, Jacob Goldberg, often shares overlaps with Gordon’s own life – journalism, writing, and moving between Chicago and Brooklyn. Jacob has a successful job as a journalist and writer, but he also feels lost in the way that all authors feel lost as passions and muses wax and wane. He seems to be searching for something – his next ‘thing’ but he also doesn’t seem to know what that thing is, or even if he wants it, really.

An unexpected revelation of how an old high school friend died breaks Goldberg out of this listlessness. And he becomes acutely obsessed with how his old friend, Seth, died. Rumours fly as Goldberg reaches out to old school friends. He decides, in true male millennial fashion, that he will do a podcast about his friend’s death that will feature interviews that will eventually reveal the truth about Seth’s life and death, like all morbid murder and death podcasts do.

Jacob starts scrolling through old social media posts, Facebook in particular, and he collects pictures, notes, posts, and messages that were shared between Seth and his friends. It has made me wonder about my own relationship with social media and how I have used it to memorialise the dead. It has made me question what we go looking for as digitalised beings – what are we searching for when we click the “See Friendship” tab on Facebook?

I’ve often searched for my brother online after he died, even though he had no social media presence. It is stupid to write and rewrite the combinations of his name, hoping that I’ll somehow find a different outcome. (I never do). And I think of friends who have died, and I think of their pictures, frozen. Archival in some ways, digitalised ephemera in others.

The beauty of Gordon’s novel is in his balance of humour and compassion as he explores complex grief, love, and awkward teenage years that we can never truly escape. I found myself invested in Goldberg’s quest and his relationship with his high school self and his friend, Seth. It was beautiful to see the constellation that Gordon constructs of Seth and his friendships with various people throughout the novel.

CONTENT WARNING: This book deals with grief, drug use, and suicide.

Please share your thoughts and ideas about “See Friendship” when it comes out. I cannot wait to hear what you think. As always, share the reading love.