A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

Goodfellas meets Thelma and Louise when an unlikely trio of women in New York find themselves banding together to escape the clutches of violent figures from their pasts.
After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbor Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she embarks on a bizarre adventure. Taking off in Enzio’s ’62 Impala, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away by Adrienne at the door. Their neighbor, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her.
When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend Richie, she figures Rena’s her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. But Richie has massacred a few members of the Brancaccio crime family for a big payday, and he drags even more trouble into the mix in the form of an unhinged enforcer named Crea. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from something and unsure what comes next.
A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself is a screwball noir about finding friendship and family where you least expect it, in which William Boyle again draws readers into the familiar—and sometimes frightening—world in the shadows at the edges of New York’s neighborhoods.
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of March 2019: A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself is one those books that announces itself as a classic in the making by the way it reads as both familiar and startlingly fresh. Mob widow Rena has clocked an insistent suitor with an ashtray, and believing she’s killed him, stolen his vintage Impala and headed for the Bronx, where her estranged daughter Adrienne lives. That however, is where Adrienne’s boyfriend Richie has just given several mobsters “early retirement,” stolen $500K from them, and is preparing to go on the run with Adrienne and her teenage daughter. It’s a really inconvenient day to try to force a family reunion. After a lifetime of willfully keeping her head in the sand when it comes to her husband’s occupation, Rena has just thrust herself into the center of it, as her flit becomes entangled with Richie’s and both of them pick up unexpected flight companions. In Rena’s case it’s the retired adult movie star who lives next door as well as a granddaughter who may have inherited some of her grandfather’s traits. In Richie’s case it’s a guy who solves problems with a hammer. What develops has been dubbed “screwball noir” and it’s an apt description. But what gives this unexpectedly charming albeit violent tale its heart is the way the women, endangered by the men in their lives, discover that the family you make for yourself may have your back in ways your actual family never will. --Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review