From the author of "Pure" and "The Summer of Firsts and Lasts" comes a friendship story with one girl, several boys, and lots of complications.

The companion to The Dead Inside, "[An] unnerving and heartrending memoir" (Publishers Weekly) This is the story of my return to high school. This is the true story of how I didn't die. High school sucks for a lot of people. High school extra sucks when you believe, deep in your soul, that every kid in the school is out to get you. I wasn't popular before I got locked up in Straight Inc., the notorious "tough love" program for troubled teens. So it's not like I was walking around thinking everyone liked me. But when you're psychologically beaten for sixteen months, you start to absorb the lessons. The lessons in Straight were: You are evil. Your peers are evil. Everything is evil except Straight, Inc. Before long, you're a true believer. And when you're finally released, sent back into the world, you crave safety. Crave being back in the warehouse. And if you can't be there, you'd rather be dead.

THE SMART GIRL'S GUIDE TO FRIENDSHIP is the essential guide to making, keeping and being a brilliant friend. Every smart girl knows the importance of friendship as she grows up - best friends share support, love and laughter, but what happens when things go wrong?

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A warm, funny, irresistible memoir that follows an improbable and life-changing college friendship over the course of forty years—from the best-selling author of The End of Your Life Book Club • “A rare view of male friendship.”—NPR “Moving…salted with Schwalbe’s well-established literary intelligence and a palpable empathy.” —The New York Times Book Review By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college, he had already met everyone he cared to know: the theater people, writers, visual artists and comp lit majors, and various other quirky characters including the handful of students who shared his own major, Latin and Greek. He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. The jocks wore baseball caps and moved in packs, filling boisterous tables in the dining hall, and on the whole seemed to be another species entirely, one Will might encounter only at his own peril. All this changed dramatically when Will collided with Chris Maxey, known to just about everyone as Maxey. Maxey was physically imposing, loud, and a star wrestler who was determined to become a Navy SEAL (where he would later serve for six years). Thanks to the strangely liberating circumstances of a little-known secret society at Yale, the two forged a bond that would become a mainstay of each other’s lives as they repeatedly lost and found each other and themselves in the years after graduation. From New Haven to New York City, from Hong Kong and Panama to a remarkable school on an island in the Bahamas—through marriages and a divorce, triumphs and devastating losses—We Should Not Be Friends tracks an extraordinary friendship over decades of challenge and change. Schwalbe’s marvelous new work is, at its heart, a joyful testament to the miracle of human connection—and how if we can just get past our preconceptions, we may find some of our greatest friends.