a book recommendation

The WG sent me The Testament of Mary, and it's so good.  (Another of my jams, by the way.  --- Is that Juliet?)

An excerpt, in which she talks about a young Jesus having friends over to their home:

But I should have paid more attention to that time before he left, to who came to the house, to what was discussed at my table.  It was not shyness or reticence that made me spend my time in the kitchen when those I did not know came, it was boredom.  Something about the earnestness of those young men repelled me, sent me into the kitchen, or garden; something of their awkward hunger, or the sense that there was something missing in each one of them, made me want to serve the food, or water, or whatever, and then disappear before I had heard a single word of what they were talking about.  They were often silent at first, uneasy, needy, and then the talk was too loud; there were too many of them talking at the same time, or even worse, when my son would insist on silence and begin to address them as though they were a crowd, his voice all false, and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him, it was like something grinding and it set my teeth on edge, and I often found myself walking the dusty lanes with a basket as though I needed bread, or visiting a neighbour who did not need visitors in the hope that when I returned the young men would have dispersed or that he would have stopped speaking.  Alone with me when they had left, he was easier, gentler, like a vessel from whom stale water had been poured out, and maybe in that time talking he was cleansed of whatever it was that had been agitating him, and then when night fell he was filled again with clear spring water which came from solitude, or sleep, or even silence and work. (pp. 11-12)

Man, I love that.  I like imagining the women around these men who wrote stories about one another -- rolling their eyes, holding back from screaming "OMFG STOP TALKING," and later, privately, calling them on their insecurity-induced, self-aggrandizing bullshit. 

I like to think that girlfriend woulda been my friend.