The world is hardly lacking stories about male friendship but we rarely hear about those friendships in romantic or passionate language. There are plenty of examples of female friendships that are romanticized, passionate, even obsessive. But I think society pushes us to believe men don’t experience friendship like that. Michael Pedersen is here to show that society is wrong on that point.

He wrote Boy Friends: a Memoir of Joy, Grief and Male Friendship in the months immediately following the death of his best friend Scott. Scott isn’t actually named until the final line of the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because the entire memoir is written directly to him. Emotions don’t get much more intense than in a letter to a loved one who’s just died and this book certainly has intensity and passion. It also has humour and quiet contemplation, self-scrutiny and hope.

“More than missing dinner, eating dinner with you, sharing dishes and stories, cocooned in, is the thing I will miss most of all. Just me and you and scran and sincerity and silliness and smut…A scientist working with gorillas in the Congo has discovered that these great apes hum and tunefully exhale while eating, composing hoppity food songs. Via euphonic noise-making, and body percussion, we did the very same – composed mealtime melodies. Dinnertime has been an awful lot quieter since you left.”

Before going further, a content warning. Scott died by suicide and this is referred to often. There is also a long section of the book describing the agonising period Pedersen and other loved ones spent searching for Scott when he disappeared in a suicidal state. But I will add that I personally find suicide a very difficult subject and I did not find this book difficult to read. Upsetting and sad, absolutely, but it was never too much.

Pedersen is a poet and it shows. His sentences are precisely crafted. He’s from Edinburgh and weaves in words of Scots and Scottish slang. Pedersen’s gentle, emotionally wide-open language sometimes feels at odds with the life he describes. For a nice middle-class boy with a job in the arts, he’s been through some stuff. He’s lived through heroin addiction and all the lowest depths that entails.

The through line of Pedersen’s life is a series of very close friendships with men. Some verged on romantic, others were dysfunctional and emotionally abusive. The healthiest came after teenage insecurity and hard drugs, and his friendship with Scott was one of those recent healthy friendships. They were close enough to state their love aloud, to be sincere as well as silly, but had their own separate lives. In some of the earlier friendships Pedersen describes, the pair become inseparable, together so much that when the friendship fizzles out or ends abruptly he experiences grief, as we do when any love ends.

I must admit that before reading this book (which was picked by my book club) I had not heard of Michael Pedersen. And I was halfway through the book before realising his friend Scott was semi-famous, a musician in a Scottish indie band that had somehow passed me by, yet beloved by many of my own favourite artists. Scott’s fame isn’t really relevant to Pedersen’s experience of friendship and grief, but it does make a lot of sense that a singer-songwriter might respond to Pedersen’s brand of emotional openness.

Grief is of course different for everyone and I hesitate to say people experiencing their own grief could find comfort in this book. Pedersen’s progress from shock to acceptance in the space of a year might come across as too neat and pat for some who are still floored by their grief years into their own grief journey. But there is beautiful writing here and some people might find it healing. Certainly, Pedersen’s last few pages contained some words that I found to be wise and true.

“Healing is not disloyal to any memory. I frequently forget the horror and don’t rebuke myself for seeking escapisms. In the months after you left, I was cankerous about misplacing any detail; a single lost frame from the spool of life arrived like a vision of doom. I am easier now if I need to recreate a memory from a thing part-formed. There is beauty in the not knowing – our life, a mystery even to ourselves.”

It is perhaps inevitable that a poet – a lover and explorer of words – would find eloquent ways to express this most charged and complicated of experiences. But I am still grateful to Pedersen for – between the jokes and the etymology of the word “friend” – exposing his raw, vulnerable suffering.

Published 2022 by Faber & Faber.

Source: Storysmith Books.