In 2018, Michael Pedersen sat down and started writing a letter to his best friend. Scott Hutchison had taken his own life a few weeks before, in May, and as Pedersen addressed his friendship with the musician, artist and lead singer of indie rock band Frightened Rabbit, he found himself returning to the male alliances that have shaped his life. The result, Boy Friends, sees Pedersen – a co-founder of avant-garde Edinburgh literary collective Neu! Reekie! – illuminate these companions with a poet’s eye, a comedian’s timing – and a lover’s care.
For all his skill, Boy Friends is self-consciously unpolished – appropriately so maybe. Real love is tricky, unplottable, stained with the dirt and struggle of everyday life. To drive this point home, the author murders a hamster in chapter one. Muffin, crushed to a pulp by the young Pedersen, hovers over the bloody-handed sprog for years to come (“Shame cast asunder the curtains of my weakling heart,” he wails, not entirely joking). Seeing him standing in the dark for hours to honour one of Muffin’s rodent successors, his mother makes a comment that could stand as Boy Friends’ epitaph. There’s nothing wrong with you, she reassures him. You just feel things a lot.
