Book Review: Keep Your Friends Close by Leah Konen

It’s taken years, but Mary has finally realized that her marriage to handsome, wealthy George Haywood is not only bad for her, but for their toddler son Alex as well. At first, George’s riches were so seductive that his controlling tendencies just seemed like a genuine interest in helping her better herself. Once she realizes that she only ever had the appearance of choice—and, worse, that her son is starting to mimic his father—she decides she needs to get out of her marriage:

What I’d thought I’d had with George had been little more than an illusion. I, a Stepford robot that George could control. One he could punish if she crossed him. And Alex, taking this dynamic in. I’ll never forget the way my toddler looked at me one morning and said, “Enough, Mary.” […] They were the same words George said to me anytime I pushed back. Enough! Enough! Enough! Like I was a child, a dog, a ward to be taught how to act properly.

 

God damn it if I was going to let my son grow up to think that all of this was okay.

George, of course, has no interest in letting her go without a fight. Though they signed an iron-clad prenup, he wants to punish her further by taking custody of Alex away from her, citing spurious reasons that his expensive lawyers plan to use to drain her much more meager savings with in a prolonged custody battle. If she comes home, however, they can go back to a comfortable life all together, or so George claims in his frequent attempts to win her back.

With her best friend no longer speaking to her, Mary is thus uniquely susceptible to the charms of gregarious, sophisticated Willa, whom she meets while on a Brooklyn playground one morning. The two swiftly bond over their children and their own relatively laidback attitudes to parenting, striking up a fast friendship and subsequently meeting even without their kids. Lonely Mary is quickly besotted:

The thing about Willa was that she didn’t often volunteer details about her past. You had to lure them out of her[.] There was something nice, almost enchanting, in the mystery of Willa. It made me feel like there would always be more to learn, like the drinks nights and playdates would never, ever end, like I didn’t have to worry about losing her–at least, not yet.

 

It all felt like promise, like possibility, and when it was like this with her, the sun on our bare legs and our children playing together so happily…

 

It almost felt like falling in love.

Alas then that after one booze-filled night together, Willa abruptly ghosts her. A devastated Mary worries that she might have revealed too much about her failing marriage and her own feelings about both it and George. She tries texting and calling, but Willa seems to have fallen right off of the face of the planet.

Fast-forward several months, and Mary is looking to start a new life in Woodstock, a town halfway between the city and Old Forge, where she grew up and still has family upstate. She’s shocked to see a familiar figure walk by as she’s having lunch in a restaurant one day. The woman has different hair and clothes, but is unmistakably Willa. Mary runs out the door to confront her, but the woman claims to have no idea who or what Mary is talking about. More strangely, Willa’s little boy is nowhere in the picture, though a little girl named Poppy is all over this woman who apparently goes by the name of Annie.

Mary is determined to make Willa admit the truth, but her plans are complicated by George’s decision to follow her to Woodstock. When George turns up dead shortly after, Mary fears that Willa might have had something to do with it. With George’s family suspecting that Mary herself murdered George, she’ll have to get to the bottom of Willa’s lies if she has any hope of not being separated forever from her beloved child.

While Mary has some excellent insights into what it means to raise good kids, my sympathies mainly lay with Willa, who has a much more realistic view of life in general. Every time Mary clutched her pearls at something Willa did and subsequently assumed the worst of her friend—ignoring the many ways in which she herself was being both a terrible friend and an even worse feminist—I felt myself rooting harder for Willa to get herself out of the predicament that her involvement with the Haywoods had landed her in. Willa’s desire to be fairly compensated for her work felt absolutely justified to me. And though I wasn’t a fan of Mary’s wishy-washiness, I very much understood Mary’s longing for companionship, platonic or otherwise. It’s important to make and maintain adult friendships, but modern living makes that hard, especially for moms.

Told from Mary and Willa’s alternate viewpoints, Keep Your Friends Close ultimately comes to a satisfying, though perhaps unexpected, conclusion. It’s a swift, entertaining read that isn’t afraid to examine white female complacency, and the “acceptable” ways in which women are allowed to rebel.