Boy Friends

Boy Friends
Michael Pedersen

Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends, a gentle and loving confrontation of grief, began when Pedersen started writing to his friend Scott Hutchison, following his tragic loss in 2018. In the aftermath, Pedersen sits in Cushendall’s Curfew Tower, penning a letter to Scott as a way to ‘digest its massiveness’. The opening pages perfectly encapsulate the bewildering mundanity of grief:

Social media platforms are canny interlocutors, regularly uprooting popular postings from the past to masquerade in front of us. I did not anticipate grieving would be so intricately interlinked with my broadband speed. Part of me thinks I should shut down my accounts, but too much light dances through these digital portals.

The book weaves the grief and love for Scott amongst reflections and adoration for a number of formative male friendships that have shaped Pedersen’s life. From comrades in the corridors of Portobello High School, to the co-dependent partnerships at the dawn of adulthood, Pedersen’s writing is uncommonly candid. He acknowledges that friendships, and the people in them, are unequivocally flawed. In one particular friendship he declares that they were an ‘alone-together compact’, united in their status of always being on the periphery of friendship groups that ultimately resulted in losing themselves in each other. While Pedersen recognises that not all friendships are lifelong unions, he conveys their substance with such pointed emotion that they are no less massive in their impact.

All roads lead to Scott, and the book draws to a close with the voyage of Scott’s last days on earth. Pedersen’s command of language creates a tangible sense of sorrow and regret as the reader is invited to indulge in the pain of recalling the last memory of Scott: ‘When you left I carried you into every moment, hijacked the present’s freshness over and over.’ Even in his prose, it is so clear that Pedersen is a poet, capturing the ache of replaying someone’s last moments—allowing yourself, for a moment, to wonder what you could’ve done.

A visceral, devastating but ultimately joyful reflection on grief through the lens of friendship, Boy Friends is as unique as it is powerful. Though there is tragedy in this path of mourning, it is expertly juxtaposed by Pedersen’s wit. I found myself laughing frequently in spite of the immense sadness that permeates. I cannot think of a more perfect ode to friendship than this book, and I love how it encapsulates and validates the deep love that can exist in the universe of us and our pals.

—Heather Leonard