Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

Finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards

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.

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. Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but less clear is what the man himself was like. In Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see Roth 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.

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


Author: Benjamin Taylor
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 09/07/2021
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780143133452
ISBN10: 0143133454
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Benjamin Taylor's family memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review; and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, and Bellow's There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, also a New York Times Editors' Choice. His edition of the collected stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2017. Taylor is a founding faculty member in the New School's Graduate School of Writing and teaches also in the Columbia University School of the Arts. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.