“In other words, the women’s minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.”

The novel opens with a story of Cambodian women who, as they witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, cried themselves blind. In a novel focused so much on death and grief, this story launches a key theme: Like the women in the story, the more the narrator struggles to overcome the loss of a loved one, the more she will struggle to clearly see and define the nature of loss and grief. The story functions as an epigraph, setting the tone for the remainder of the book.

“And: Now he’s officially a dead white male.”

The Friend is an example of self-aware literary fiction. In the above quote, a mourner at a deceased writer’s funeral makes a joke about the nature of the literary canon. By dying, the author has entered the cadre of dead white males whose works comprise the literary canon. The comment is a wry, ironic aside, a joke the deceased friend himself might have loved. It also depicts humor as another way humans try to deal with grief.