Relationships

The Good Life

Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz · 2023

Harvard has been following the same group of men, and later their families, since 1938 — the longest study of adult life ever run — and the headline finding is almost annoyingly simple. The strongest predictor of who stayed healthy and happy into old age was not money, fame, cholesterol or social class. It was the quality of their relationships at fifty. Waldinger runs the study now, and the book is full of the actual lives rather than the statistics, which is what makes it land.

How to Know a Person

David Brooks · 2023

Brooks starts from the observation that most of us are worse at this than we assume: we ask questions we already know the answer to, we wait to talk, we form a view of someone in the first ten minutes and then spend years collecting evidence for it. His subject is the skill of actually seeing another person, which he treats as something learnable rather than a personality trait. The chapter on how to sit with somebody in the worst week of their life is worth the whole book.

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett · 2016

One kiss at a christening party in 1964 breaks two marriages and throws six children together, and Patchett follows all of them for fifty years. Nobody in it is a villain, which is the point. She is exceptional on the way a family formed by accident becomes as real as one formed on purpose, and on how differently the same events are remembered by the people who were standing in the same room.

Difficult Conversations

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen · 1999

From the Harvard Negotiation Project, and the least romantic book here in the best way. Their central move is to separate any hard conversation into three: what actually happened, what everyone felt about it, and what it says about who we are. Most rows go wrong because all three are being had at once by people who think they are having only the first. Works on a colleague, a sister and a spouse, which is not something most books manage.

The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 2023

An Irish family in a failing car dealership, told in four voices, each of whom is carrying something enormous that the others know nothing about. Murray is very funny for a long stretch and then quietly devastating, and the structure does the real work: you watch four people love each other and misread each other simultaneously, with all the information they each needed sitting in the next chapter.

The Examined Life

Stephen Grosz · 2013

Thirty-one very short pieces from twenty-five years of psychoanalytic practice, most of them about relationships: the man who cannot stop lying, the woman whose husband will not leave, the child who will not speak. Each is a few pages and each is astonishingly clear. Grosz is the opposite of a self-help writer; he offers no method and simply shows people to you, and the recognition does the work.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin · 2022

Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital games room as children and spend thirty years making video games together, falling out spectacularly, and never once sleeping with each other. It is here because it takes seriously something novels usually treat as a subplot: that the defining relationship of a life is often not the romantic one, and that creative partnership can carry as much love, jealousy and betrayal as any marriage.