“Rules for Visiting” by Jessica Francis Kane

I really loved this book. I hadn’t known at all what to expect from it. Some unknown amount of time ago, for some unremembered reason, I’d noted the title and author on a short list of Books I Want To Read that I happened to re-discover during Black Friday week, so I went ahead and bought it with only the knowledge that at some point in the past, something about it had interested me. 

As it turns out, this is the story of May Attaway, forty-year-old botanist at a local university (working in the grounds rather than as a professor) who still lives with her father and doesn’t really have any friends. She had a few friends in the past, but didn’t really make any effort to keep them, and hadn’t tried making any new ones for quite a while. 

But recently she had started to notice all the friendships going on around her, and had begun to wonder if maybe she was missing out on something. So when the university gifted her with an extra month of paid vacation to thank her for her years of service, she decided to use the time to visit her four closest friends from the past. 

This book is what I would describe as a treatise on friendship disguised as a novel. As I read, I realized I was looking for instruction in the same way I did with the handful of conversation-related books I read a few years back, only with a different outcome. I did not improve my conversational skills by reading those previous books (nor was I reassured that my current skills were adequate). With Rules for Visiting, while I didn’t gather any useful advice on how to make new friends, it did make me feel good about my cultivation of old friendships. 

Finishing this book was, however, a narrowly avoided catastrophe. We are on vacation, and (looking back now I can see it) I very stupidly only packed two books. And this was the second one. I just assumed I wouldn’t want to have my nose constantly in a book. (Do I know myself at all??) Luckily Sam dug up a book in our rental—and it’s actually one we have at home, on my TBR shelf. Whew! Disaster averted.