Fast Friends: Tales of Remarkable Friendship

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By SB Borcy

There is something almost countercultural about a book that simply celebrates friendship without wrapping it in trauma, self-help advice, or a tidy lesson about personal growth. Dan Gribbin trusted the subject to carry its own weight, and across seventeen stories Fast Friends proves that trust was completely warranted.

Reading it feels like settling into the kind of evening where the conversation keeps surprising you. The collection doesn't stay in one emotional register for long, which is exactly what keeps it alive. A reunion that catches you off guard sits next to a story about strangers forming an unlikely bond under circumstances that shouldn't work but somehow do. A married couple rediscovering each other on the road carries a different kind of warmth than a friendship forged between people who have no obvious reason to connect, and Gribbin moves between those textures with the ease of a writer who genuinely enjoys the range. The pinch of betrayal he seasons the collection with is particularly well-placed. It keeps things honest in a way that pure sentimentality never could.

What the book is really exploring sits beneath any single story. Gribbin is circling the question of what actually makes a friendship remarkable, and his answer turns out to be less about grand gestures and more about the specific, often unexpected ways people show up for each other. Characters anticipating each other's needs before being asked, going to bat without being recruited, revealing backstories that reframe everything that came before: these are the moments the collection keeps returning to, and they land every time.

The humor running through the book is one of its genuine pleasures. It never overwhelms the emotional current but gives the collection a buoyancy that makes the harder moments land cleaner.

For anyone who has ever underestimated how interesting friendship actually is as a subject, this book makes a quietly persuasive case that it might be the most interesting subject there is.