Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things is the grief story no one told us we desperately needed and somehow also the funniest book of the year.
There are books you enjoy, books you admire, and then very rarely books that reach into your chest and rearrange something permanently. Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things is firmly in that third category. I read it in two sittings. I cried twice. I laughed out loud probably a dozen times. And then I sat very still for a while, thinking about everyone I love.
That's the kind of novel this is.
What Is It About?
Ash and Edi have been best friends since childhood, the kind of friendship that becomes its own country, with its own language, its own shared mythology. But now Edi is dying of ovarian cancer, and Ash has moved into the hospice to be with her through the final weeks.
What follows is not what you might expect from a book about death. It is warm, wickedly funny, and profoundly alive. Newman writes the hospice as a place filled with small mercies, absurd humor, and unexpected joy. Ash brings snacks. There is wine, somehow. There is so much love it almost becomes unbearable to read.
Newman understands something very few writers dare to say: grief and laughter are not opposites. They are the same gasp of air, the body insisting it is still here, still feeling, still alive even at the edge of loss.
Why This Book Is Different
We have ten thousand stories about romantic love. We have almost none about the friend who has known you longer than anyone, who holds the earliest, truest version of you.
We All Want Impossible Things fills that gap with extraordinary grace.
The humor is real. The banter between Ash and Edi is electric. You will quote these lines.
It honours female friendship like almost no other novel does, front and center, with full weight and tenderness.
It tells the truth about grief. Messy, hilarious, heartbreaking, mundane. All at once.
It will change what you do tonight. Everyone who reads this book texts someone they love immediately after. Don't fight it.
The Professional Case for Reading It
The best business skill is human understanding. And the best way to develop it is fiction.
This book is a masterclass in showing up for someone. In staying when staying is hard. In witnessing another person's vulnerability without flinching. Those are not soft skills, they are the skills that determine whether people trust you, follow you, and want to work beside you for years.
Read it for the friendship. Stay for the grief. Leave changed.
Pick up We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman. Then text your best friend. In that order.
