Greetings, once again dear reader! 👋🏽
I hope you are doing well and taking good care of yourself.
Welcome to another edition of this spectacular newsletter.
The Three of Us is an engaging story narrating the events of a day in the lives of a married couple and the wife’s rather domineering best friend, Temi, who seems determined to make sure her friend can’t have what she says she doesn’t want.
Written in 3 chapters, each one from the perspective of each character, it is a rather interesting angle to the complexity of friendships. It’s the author’s debut novel, published in May 2023.
My initial conclusion was that the three characters in this book are grossly unserious people. On second thought, though, it seems they have deep-seated issues that have nothing to do with each other. Especially Temi, the best friend, who is the only character’s name we know.
Temi is too scared of losing her friend to a man and takes every opportunity to disregard him, make jokes about him, or talk about the life they had before he came along and swept her friend off her feet. The husband despises the best friend as he thinks she brings out a side of his wife that he doesn’t know or like. The wife, on the other hand, clearly has issues with boundaries, as well as her identity.
“I had expectations of marriage…but there have been two notable differences. One is that we wake up next to each other every day, in the same bed…The second is the presence of her friend…whose proximity I’d assumed would decrease over time as she came to understand the unspoken boundaries of a marriage she was not in, and the intimacy that she should not be a party to.”
Before the couple met and got married, the wife and her best friend made a pact of sorts to live a life only for themselves. No husbands or children, annual vacations, and living within walking distance from each other. With her friend falling in love and getting married, Temi begins to feel their “sacred and important” friendship slip away. Feeling threatened, she appoints herself a saviour for her friend and resolves to do everything in her power to save her from the shackles of marriage.
After a month away, Temi visits her friend, they drink some wine and catch up. As the day progresses, we see the events and long-standing tension that have led to this fateful day unfold. Temi then says she wants to have a nap, and also buy some more wine while her friend decides to go and see her husband at work.
“It was difficult to see my friend, this wise and beautiful woman, fall in love—or something adjacent to that—with this…person, without questioning whether her goals—which we once shared—had changed.”
With her friend gone, Temi snoops around the house and ends up finding something she would use in her latest ploy to help her friend see the light and choose the life they dreamed and talked about.
This book makes for a nice weekend read and a good recommendation if you’re looking for something funny and different. As always, I want to know what was going through the author’s mind when she came up with the idea for this story.
Have you read this book? What did you think about it? Kindly leave a comment.
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