Friendships become closer as you get older argues the novelist, because by middle age everyone has faced dramatic challenges, disappointments and sorrows – and being honest about them is a powerful point of bonding

My ninth book is published this week, and in recent years I’ve described my writing like this: I take care with my sentences, but exquisite prose isn’t my goal. My goal is to give the reader the feeling that you – and by you, I mean me – have when you’re going for a long walk with a close friend, and the friend says: “The craziest thing just happened to me.” What?! You think and possibly say. Tell me immediately! And then what happened, and then what happened? As a writer, this is the urgency I’m chasing, this is the investment, the richness of emotion, the confiding and closeness and caring.

A line in Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours, a book I’ve discussed with many friends, perfectly captures for me this sense of participating in a bottomless conversation: “I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours.”