The Companion Who Lives in Your Head: Imaginary Friends, Spirit Guides, and the Inner Life of the Boy

-An Essay on Reading Great Are the Myths"What if you're my imaginary friend?"The boy asks this near the very end. They are lying side by side on sun loungers in the California desert, covered in blankets, the way they used to lie in the garden in Memphis when they were thirteen and fourteen and the world was still small enough to hold. The novel has spent nearly three hundred pages building to this moment and then — true to itself — it refuses to resolve it. Birdie deflects. She laughs. She says, "If I am, you've made me so real I feel mighty alive." And then, once he has fallen quiet, she thinks to herself: Sometimes I think he is my imaginary friend too.The question hangs in the desert air like heat. And that is exactly where the novel wants it: unanswered, shimmering, alive with possibility.