reading with nicole

I'm really excited to talk about this Helen Garner novel, The Spare Room, but first, let's talk about how I came to be reading it. I was traveling with my best friend and her parents, which is the sort of thing you usually do in high school with people whose parents can afford to go nice places and yours can't, so they bring you along, and you feel grateful and awkward and young, but this wasn't like that, this was another kind of thing, which is when you and your best friend are really genuinely fond of your respective parents and welcome the opportunity to be with them as adults.And we were driving around, and my best friend's family is Australian, while I am Canadian, so you can imagine the elaborate system of unnecessary apologies and "please, it's my turn to take the middle seat," "are you comfortable? yes! I'm quite comfortable" Commonwealth twitterings we engaged in, and the entire experience was lovely, and then we fell into talking about books. We were talking first about Paul Theroux, the travel writer who wrote my favourite super-weird book, Sir Vidia's Shadow, about how he and V.S. Naipaul used to be besties, and then had a Falling-Out as a result of (among literally a thousand dishily-discussed things) Theroux finding all the books he'd written and then personally inscribed for Naipaul for sale in a London shop. It is seriously a book-length bitch session, and I could not love it more. I think I've mentioned this somewhere before, but I actually ran into two OTHER friends of Naipaul, who were, no joke, the "best friends from childhood" that Vanessa Bayer and Fred Armisen play on SNL, and asked them within four seconds of being introduced if they had read Sir Vidia's Shadow, and they said: "Oh, of COURSE. We all have! Thousands of times! But we tell him we haven't, and we hide it when he comes over."V.S. Naipaul: your friends are reading Paul Theroux's book about you behind your back.