Here We Are

My Friendship with Philip Roth

By: Benjamin Taylor

Narrated by: Benjamin Taylor

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award

A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.

I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement.

So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.

Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

©2020 Benjamin Taylor (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"If you never met Philip Roth, you can now, for Ben Taylor’s new hook enacts a kind of resurrection. In addition to bringing a mastery of the writer’s work, Taylor has somehow managed to conjure the living man - someone I found wholly at odds with his public persona. Here is the Roth I knew rendered at his most antic, hilarious, rancorous, tender. Forget the work of Boswell's Johnson, I have never read a more touching portrait of literary friendship. Smart, moving, wise - Taylor’s page-turning book sets a new standard for both memoir and literary biography." (Mary Karr)

Thankful

As an avid fan of Mr.Roth’s novels, I have immensely enjoyed this intimate look at a special friendship we all could be so lucky to have. Ben’s unique style of writing often made me feel as though I was in the room with them. It doesn’t get much better than that. “Thank you” Ben for sharing Here We Are with the world. Now, I look forward to your book on PROUST! Regards, Kenny King- Mobile, AL

Fantastic!

I have experienced many of these things & will definitely listen again! Did Tanglewood in 1976. Know Lenox/Pittsfield well. Read many of Roth's others particularly "The Human Stain"