We Can Still Be Friends

"Kelly Cherry brings an unerring ear and a poet’s sensibility to her difficult task: unraveling the tangle of emotions in our all-too-human hearts."—Lee Smith

"We Can Still Be Friends is Kelly Cherry at her best, which is to say it is a brilliant novel both furious and funny."—Robert Olen Butler

"Cherry’s novel is lyrical, offbeat and sexy."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ava has invested everything in her long-running affair with Tony, a handsome doctor from Chicago, though lately, things have not been quite right. Then Tony telephones Ava to tell her that yes, there is someone else, and that his new love, Claire, is the beautiful art-historian wife of a movie producer whom he had been seeing for two months. But, he assures Ava, of course, he cares for her, and they can still be friends.

Ava is furious. This was the relationship that was supposed to lead to marriage, or at least a child. She decides that she is owed a baby, and that she is going to collect, if not from Tony then from Claire’s husband, Boyd. By permitting Claire’s affair, he is to blame for Ava’s loss. And Ava flies out to Los Angeles to tell him so.

But what happens changes everything, for Ava, Tony, Claire and Boyd. This is a witty and whimsical take on the age old adage, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Kelly Cherry is the author of six works of fiction, as well as a memoir, essays, stories, nine volumes of poetry and two translations. She is Eudora Welty professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing. She now lives in Virginia with her husband.