180. Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Dear readers, earlier this year I featured books I love by living authors, and this week I’m doing the same for the deceased. The first is close to home: my fellow Texan and Rice University alum, Larry McMurtry. My enduring favorite of his is Lonesome Dove (1985), but I assume you’re already familiar with it. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972) is the second of his six Houston books, the most famous of which is Terms of Endearment (1975).
Larry McMurtry wasn’t from Houston; he came from the brushy, dry country up near the Oklahoma border. But in All My Friends are Going to be Strangers he nailed, with the vivid attentiveness of a non-native, the feeling of walking through Houston’s swampy nights. The book is young-mannish: written by a young man, about a young man stumbling from Houston to California and back again, through comically disastrous romances in which neither he nor the wholly unsuitable women he’s with are up for meaningful relationships. Ah: youth.
Houston was my companion on the walk. She had been my mistress, but after a thousand nights together, just the two of us, we were calling it off. It was a warm, moist, mushy, smelly night, the way her best nights were. The things most people hated about her were the things I loved: her heat, her dampness, her sumpy smells. She wasn’t beautiful, but neither was I. I liked her heat and her looseness and her smells. Those things were her substance, and if she had been cool and dry and odorless I wouldn’t have cared to live with her three years. We were calling it off, but I could still love her. She still reached me, when I went walking with her… I had had such good of Houston, she had dealt so generously with me, always, that I walked and stroked her shoulder for an hour or two, in the night. Then, when she was really sleeping, I went home. I wanted to be gone before she woke up.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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