JESSICA DETTMANN Your Friend and Mine. Reviewed by Sally Nimon

The new novel from the author of Without Further Ado and How to be Second Best is a story of friendship and second chances. 

Margot, you’re my best friend. I will take care of you. You are going to live to be a very old lady in a horrible nursing home where your ungrateful children have put you because you are ancient and you will have lived such a clean and pure life that you simply Will. Not. Die. 

So says English backpacker Tess to her friend Margot as they work together waiting tables and bars in turn of the century Sydney. Through the dynamic interactions of these two young women from opposite sides of the globe, Jessica Dettmann’s Your Friend and Mine explores the universal themes of friendship, mortality, legacy and what a life really amounts to when all that remains of it are a few scattered memories in other people’s heads.

When the story opens, Margot is in her forties, co-owner of a successful Sydney restaurant with chef partner Johnny, supporting her son as he ventures into early adulthood, and living the life she always thought she wanted. Things aren’t perfect but they are comfortable, and the brief adolescent dream of endless adventure with Tess in London has long been left behind. Enter a letter from an unknown solicitor, informing her that her friend, who died 20 years ago, has left her a legacy in her will. However, she will have to travel to London to claim it.

Despite brief hesitation, more from inertia than anything else, she decides to go. On arrival she discovers her friend has left a series of letters outlining tasks she is required to complete, along with the funds to enable it. Margot finds herself going along on this postmortem scavenger hunt, seeing the places and meeting the people who shaped Tess’s short but apparently eventful life. As she goes through this process, Margot inevitably finds herself examining her own moments, her choices, decisions and non-decisions, that have led her to this point.

It’s easy to think we know where this is going. The typical western mid-life narrative dictates that the bored wife or husband will travel unexpectedly overseas and abandon their safe but predictable life for one of adventure, insecurity and an exciting – maybe even dangerous – romantic liaison. But that is not what Dettmann does here. Instead, the reader is offered questions to which there are no absolute answers. As Margot follows in her friend’s footsteps, alternative paths are placed before her, but these fantasy lives leave her none the wiser as to where the reality might really have led.

Take the example of what might have happened if Margot had thrown caution to the wind and fled to London to that imagined shared flat. Unlike Tess, Margot is not an adventurous personality. Her safe life was chosen, not imposed upon her. She was, it turned out, not a carefree young woman but one who was in the early stages of pregnancy. Tess would not have been the carefree friend she had been in Sydney, but someone whose life was soon to be cut short by cancer. The man Tess had chosen for her, her stepbrother Leo, was not the exciting archaeologist-slash-spy of her imagination but an ordinary man trying to do his best by everyone and himself. In fact, had all this occurred, Margot may well have found herself fantasising about the life she would have lived had she stayed in Australia and been a parent with Johnny.

And how well did Margot really know her friend? Their time together was intense, but brief. To Margot, Tess was vivacious, exciting and fun; but her siblings seemed to know a very different young woman: 

She made life quite difficult for Dad at times. Remember, Dad? When she was a teenager and she was so flouncy and shouty. Well, screamy, really. She went through that period where she would either not speak to us at all or she’d just scream in our faces. Awful. I mean, everyone goes through adolescence but my god, Tess really made everyone around her go through it too. 

It turns out that Tess had good reason for her hysterics that summer, but the reality is that there will always be a road not taken. That is not a tragedy, that is life. The simple unavoidable truth is that we cannot open every door we are offered, and the ones we do choose to pass through don’t necessarily lead where we might think. If Margot does grow old with ungrateful children – as Tess hypothesises in one of her posthumous letters – would this be as horrible as it might at first appear? At least it would mean she got to grow old, with a clean and pure life and a legacy in the form of offspring. At the same time, what would it mean to Simply. Not. Die? Would we really want to live forever and see everything we know grow old and withered and disappear? Seen in this light, maybe Tess’s path is not as tragic as it might first seem – her life was short but it was full and there is no hint of regret or sadness in any of her letters. 

Was Tess ‘awful’ or was she fun? Was her life a tragedy or was it as fulfilled as Margot’s? In the end there is no way to know. Despite the easy reading, semi-comic nature of this narrative, we are left with a truth however uncomfortable – that we are in the end the sum of our choices, and it is up to us to make the most of them. However dull, boring or predictable they might seem. 

Jessica Dettmann Your Friend and Mine Atlantic Books 2025 PB 384pp $32.99

Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre. 

You can buy Your Friend and Mine from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, Jessica | Dettmann, life choices, second chances, women's friendship