A few weeks ago, I was going through the thousand-odd people I follow on one social media site in an effort to ease my transition onto another, when I noticed that I was still following the accounts of several people who were dead. I tabbed over to their pages, knowing I would not see anything profound or overwhelming, merely the mundane thoughts they'd had in 2013, 2017, or 2024, preserved in amber as long as the platform clings to life. The contrast between ephemerality and permanence was jarring. I didn't know whether it felt more respectful to continue following them or let them go.
This precise, hypermodern dissonance is one of the subjects of Jeremy Gordon's forthcoming novel, See Friendship. Gordon's book tells the story of Jacob, a somewhat adrift digital-media drone who needs to create something substantial to keep his career going. Once he learns that a close high school friend named Seth did not die in his sleep as he was told, but under stranger and more tragic circumstances, he decides to create a narrative podcast investigating the death.
I should disclose that I am friends with Jeremy. We got our starts as writers at the same time and for many of the same outlets, namely the Classical, where we were both edited by Defector's own David Roth and which now only exists as a bizarre AI ghost ship. I found the book moving and quite funny (I've always found Jeremy's work funny), and I also found it echoed an uncanny number of my own experiences, as it is about digital media, friendship, and, to a lesser degree, digital-media friendship, written by a friend I made and communicated with along the wavelength of digital media. I spoke with him earlier this week over video chat about grief, nostalgia, and much more.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. See Friendship is out March 4; you can preorder it here.
One of the first rhythms I picked up on in the book is that there aren't really last names. It democratizes things, and my theory is that you are kind of putting everyone on the same level in a certain way. And to me, this lines up with how you think about, interact with, and talk about your friends.
That's exactly true. I think there's literally no world in which I've ever referred to meeting a friend and said their full name. I would describe seeing you as, Oh, I'm meeting my friend Patrick, unless I thought that they knew you in particular. It's a little too formal, especially when it's people I went to high school with or college with. I don't know if it was an extremely conscious decision, I will admit to that, but this certainly was the idea that if someone was just describing meeting someone at the bar, they wouldn't go full résumé on it.
That makes sense, and I think that flows into something I liked about the style and that I've liked about you as a writer generally, having read your work for a very long time, is that everything feels approachably conversational. And I wonder if, as someone who has primarily written nonfiction for the internet, you were especially excited to write dialogue? As someone with faint fiction ambitions, the idea of writing dialogue is very intimidating to me.
When I first started writing fiction, I had this sort of idea that is maybe not uncommon to other people who also work in nonfiction where I was like, There's my nonfiction writing and there's my fiction writing: two separate things. While fiction and nonfiction are obviously very different and do different things, I realized suddenly one day that, for better or worse, I am the writer who I am. I have my own style and my own preoccupations. There was absolutely no way to segment them into their own worlds. I mean, it'd be one thing if I was really trying to write experimental fiction about world historical events or whatever. But I was trying to do something that felt like it was coming from me.
It's not that I was just trying to write a book that felt familiar necessarily, but I think for me it was important to have it come from an honest place, even as I was obviously fictionalizing everything and talking about emotions that are not literally my own. When I say honest, I mean it didn't want it to feel like I was putting on airs. Which is nothing against putting on airs, I mean, I've written things that are a little bit more, I suppose, "high style," as they used to say. But it just had to feel like it was coming from a real place, and to that end, the dialogue was natural to write, because I was writing about characters who are people not completely dissimilar from people in my world. So imagining how we talk and recalling how my friends and I talk was very generative in that sense, as opposed to having to reconstruct how a medieval peasant talked when they were complaining about the king.
Yeah, there was one line when they're at the high school reunion ("He took her hand and swore he was done playing Madden with the homies") that really made me laugh. I could just see you saying that.
I always want to maintain the fidelity of how people actually talk. When I think of snatches of dialogue that come back to me, just as common as the intelligent, meaningful things are the things that are so dumb, just idiot-logic stuff from guys who were so serious. There's no binary: Going to college does not prevent you from sounding like a dumbass.
Obviously, there's a lot of yourself in here. Both you and the protagonist have the same initials and are from Chicago. Your dad and the fictional Jacob Goldberg's dad both died when you and he were in college. I'm not really interested in recapitulating a decade of autofiction discourse, but I am wondering what you learned about yourself writing a faintly autobiographical novel.
I realize I've sort of set myself up for this in the process of writing this book, but to be extremely explicit, the book is heavily fictional. The stuff you just described of being from Chicago, having a dead father, and being half Asian, that's not far from the totality of things that really happened, although there are certainly things in the book that are inspired by real-life dynamics.
Yeah, this is very clearly not your life.
For me, it was an experiment in starting in a very familiar place and then pushing it and smudging it as much as I could. As to your question, I've sort of been describing the character as a charming, shittier version of me, which is to say, someone who's really self-absorbed and wrapped up in his own bullshit, for genuine reasons and narcissistic reasons, which I think is not an uncommon straddling for many people in our world. You have people who have gone through some real things, but at the same time, is the best way to deal with that by broadcasting it for a paying audience that's going to reward you for going viral and whatnot? In writing about a person who's very incentivized to chase that, I learned that I'm not that type of person at all, and I would, in fact, probably rather leave the industry, rather than have to keep scraping the bottom of the barrel to stay alive.
But I think there is something peculiar about the fact that you and I are part of the exact one generation who was able to make a living and have their professional sensibilities shaped by this very specific dynamic of working for these places that are going to reward you based on your ability to generate attention. There's kind of a strange relationship between attention and money. Nothing really seems to solve it all until you know you're laid off or you get a promotion. So in the novel, Jacob is someone who's very fixated on maintaining his status, while I think in real life, I just would have been content to keep going until they fire me and then do something else in my life.
The process of putting yourself into your work, extracting and monetizing other people's traumatic experiences, and the psychic toll of both processes is one of the core themes. And like you said, we have had similar experiences, though I wonder if this mining of the worst experiences in people's lives is not all that specific to digital media.
It's funny, over the weekend, my wife and I watched two movies: Manchester By The Sea and Hard Truths, which were both sort of oddly resonant as companion films. They're studies of two characters who really hate themselves, one of them who takes it out on himself, Casey Affleck in Manchester, and one of them who takes it out on the world, Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths. And what's funny is that when Kenneth Lonergan is imagining what Casey Affleck's character does in order to be the most depressed man, he imagines the world's most horrible thing, something that makes him into a shell of a person. And it's so devastating that it's sort of insane to imagine this happening to anyone you know.
On the other hand, the protagonist of Hard Truths, Pansy, she's miserable because of the regular fucked-upedness of life. Mike Leigh is genius enough to avoid particularity. If there's particular tragedy in her background, it's only alluded to, but the things that have happened to her to make her miserable are simply the conditions of the society she's born into. None of it is extraordinary. It's just ordinary hard truths, so to speak, all which is just to say that I think it is very easy to forget that, as they say in Buddhism, the world is made up of suffering. There are unbelievable amounts of pain and degradation and tragedy in everyone's life.
The thing that I certainly struggled with in this world of highlighting your pain for public attention is that there's a very fine line between like, OK, am I really doing this because I want other people who've been through a similar thing to maybe come to some some understanding about themselves, some healing? Am I performing a public good? Or is it more like, Hey, please look at me. Look at what's happened to me. Take my pain seriously, prioritize it over your own. It's tricky. Some people secretly want the attention, and some people really don't, and I think there's no real way to know where people land until it happens, you know? I mean, many people are very private, and many people are not private at all. Some people want to be asked. Some people don't.
That transitions well into something I had planned to ask about toward the end, but so much of this book, in fact the parts that most affected me, is about grief. Another thing you and I have in common is that we each had a parent die in our sophomore year of college. The largely private grieving process you describe in the book was very similar to mine. At no point did I ever want to deal with any of that in public.
But the point you make about Jacob's grief toward the end of the book is that the parts of it that are actually profound are the parts that are universal. Ultimately, what I came around to is that I miss talking to my mom, and the ubiquity of that feeling, or its shadow, is comforting. So I wanted to ask how much your own experience with grieving your father informed the project of writing about a very different kind of death.
There was this book that came out two years ago by Blake Butler called Molly, where he was writing about his wife who died by suicide. There's something so raw about seeing someone untangle their feelings about such a tragic event in the immediate aftermath, and that really comes to you on the page. Whereas with me, and this is one of the experiences in the book I share, there was this pushing off the process of grieving, or pushing off the process of literalizing my feelings. I certainly grieved him when he passed, but I don't think it was until time had really passed that I was able to understand how I had processed it all.
People could say the right things, I could read the right literature, I could encounter meaningful art, but the only thing that really made an impact was time. You know, one day you wake up and it's five years later. A telling thing for me is that, early on, I was so attuned to how I would come off to other people that before they'd asked me about my dad, I'd be like, Well, you know, I'm gonna say something really depressing. I'm gonna bring down the mood, I don't want to, but like, blah blah, my dad actually died. And they'd be like, I'm so sorry. And then, I got to a certain point where they'd ask me and I'd be like, Oh yeah, my dad died. They'd still be apologetic, but I had lost the preamble and the sort of self-awareness and the sensitivity, which to me communicated that I had just simply dealt with it.
In some regards, a big idea behind the book is really unpacking your feelings years later, after you've already processed something. You've already shed your tears and come to your healthier understandings, and then something bubbles up that makes you reconsider everything. And it's a confusing effect, because the reality is, we live in the present and upturning the past is only so helpful. You wonder, Am I doing this for real reasons of healing and positivity?
That's beautiful, and it really reminds me of the part in the book where Jacob is visiting Rachel, which is where the title comes from. She talks about continuing to post on Seth's Facebook wall, in almost the opposite of what you're describing. It's this very public excoriation of the worst thing that's ever happened, a kind of dealing with it through a form of denial, a dedication to keeping this fully formed version of someone alive through ritualistic public grieving. And then, years later, she sees the "See Friendship" tab, and when presented with the amassed, one-way communiques, she deletes her Facebook. Letting go can be the hardest part, the thing that takes the longest, but it maybe matters the most.
No matter what social media platform you're on, there's this pressure of the numbers going up. You accumulate these data, you accumulate these interactions, and it's all supposed to be meaningful even though you're being pushed to gamify your interactions with humanity. Which can be fun, we love to post a tweet and have it go viral. But as it relates to these Facebook tools, the title of the book is intentionally a tad awkward, because this feature is not nostalgia-providing, it's almost nostalgia-ruining in some sense, because you just have all these like interactions that are totally stripped of context.
I have friends who've passed, whose Facebooks are still alive, and when I was writing, I clicked on some of these tabs because I'm not really very familiar with the feature and what I saw were these broken, semi-complete versions of what happened years ago. I can see so-and-so posted on my wall, but maybe I never responded back, or they posted some photo grainy beyond comprehensibility. We've seen these glossy Facebook ads where they try to sell you that this platform can be the locus of the way that you've like spent your time on Earth. But the experience is more like when you read an old article and half the links are broken. It's very clear that this thing that you know once mattered just does not exist in the same way anymore. I mean, I don't know, it's possible that I'm too negative on nostalgia after having it served up on a platter as our millennial experience. But I really struggle to find like meaning in this stuff when it's shown to me.
I'm pretty stridently anti-nostalgia, too. In the moment, all my old Facebook interactions felt so ephemeral, and the idea that they could be permanently meaningful sounds horrible to me. It feels very uncanny to be of the age where we are no longer apex consumers, and therefore the things being marketed to us are just going to be increasingly nostalgiafied.
Yeah, we're halfway in the demographic of 18-to-49, but I have nothing in common with an 18-year-old, or a 49-year-old for that matter.
Not to talk too baldly about the ideas in the book, but something I thought about a lot was this idea that you can understand external phenomena through self-knowledge, that there's a value in selfward obsession, or that it's a way of putting everything in its right place. And what I'm asking is: Is there, though? Do you really sort these things out that way? Do you come to a better truth? Or are all these gesticulations a coverup for something more elemental and simpler? I think this is a struggle of the written form, where sometimes you don't need to write an article, sometimes you don't really need to write an essay. Sometimes it's just like a thought, and you move on. It's both more complicated and more simple than that, but sometimes you need the full podcast-length version of something, and sometimes you really don't.
That's funny, and forgetting or moving past things you don't find interesting is a totally normal human impulse. And actually, something the book explores is the psychic damage of not internalizing that, of maintaining a posture that everything matters and is significant and must be chronicled.
One of the things that Jacob is attuned to, and this is something I think about in our profession, is that having the luxury to just think through everything and comb through the details really is a luxury. Not everyone has the time or inclination, even if you wanted to interrogate the past, you just have other shit going on. Today, there are easy mechanisms that allow you to re-engage with your old nostalgia, whereas 30 years ago, you'd have to go through all these steps that are so much more involved to get a hold of someone. Now you can just log on. Last week I was having lunch with a woman I went to grade school with, and she mentioned the name of some girl, saying, I always thought she was so cool. What happened her? I just went back to my computer and googled her. And within two seconds I learned, Oh, she's a lawyer in Texas. Mystery solved.
There's a character in the book who you find out now runs a yak farm, and even something that colorful is presented as a dead end. One of the vaguely connected themes that I really liked, that you explored a lot, was this idea that just because you observe something doesn't mean you understand it.
I'm fine accepting that there are things that I'm not an expert in, and I should look to other people, but there's this idea in the culture right now that you have to question everything. If you're not interrogating everything that's in front of you, you're missing out because They are trying to take things from us and if you don't watch out, They're going to do it. And it's like, sure, but there are some things that actually you don't really need to read into too deeply. Observing something is not necessarily the same as proof of conspiracy or ill intent, even if obviously those things exist. But being able to get along in life means being able to tell the difference in a meaningful way when something is actually worth paying attention to and when something is just filler.
I think people's attitude toward gossip is so often informed by how they really feel about something. I don't like to gossip about my friends, which is not to say that I don't enjoy a prurient secret or two, I'm just not as driven to know everything about what my peripheral friends are up to. However, when I hear a crazy story about a celebrity, you know, someone who I don't know at all, that's a little bit more charged to me, as opposed to just like, So-and-so is sleeping with so-and-so, I'm just like, That's cool.
Actually, that was something I remember being struck by the last time we hung out when we were gossiping about media people we both know. You had this almost lawyerly sense of fairness. You were counseling moderation when I totally didn't want you to, though I remember being ultimately appreciative of that.
I mean, listen, it's good to have fun. But I do often think that there's a flip side of friendship as well, which I've thought about sometimes when I've been frustrated with a certain friend. I find myself getting annoyed thinking things like, He's always doing this fucking shit, etc. I try to step back and remember that my friend's just having a tough day, and it's because I'm so close to him, and because I'm so attuned to everything that's going on with him that I'm confusing that proximity for insight, when it's just proximity. And so what if he's a certain way? I mean, that's the human experience, baby. So, yes, being able to tell the difference is important for someone like Jacob, who's so laser-fixated on this idea that he missed something the first time but now is the time to put it together, because he really has to do this. The book asks: Well, maybe not?
My last question is more of a comment: I thought it was cool that the character whose name is Patrick is someone who shows public bravery, dispenses brilliant insights, and is recognized by his peers. That's all.
Patrick was sort of a late, late addition to the process. I was thinking, What's just a good name for a great guy, you know, a solid guy who everyone admires? Something just kind of came through when I was watching the Chiefs one day, and Patrick Mahomes was right in front of me, and I was—no, I'm kidding, of course we don't root for the Chiefs in this household.
