The Things We Take, The Things We Give, and the People We Become

My mother always said “Good friend is betta than pocket money!” iykyk…

But what does it mean to be a good friend? And what happens when the people who once knew us best begin to know us differently?

Friendship is one of those relationships we don’t always give enough room to examine. We celebrate the beginnings, the laughter, the shared memories and the feeling of finding someone who just gets us. But what happens when life changes? When one person moves forward in a different direction? When motherhood, marriage, money, ambition, grief and personal growth begin to reshape the friendship we thought would last forever?

This November, TBGR Book Club is making space for those questions with Take What You Can by Naima Coster, and truly I’m excited about this one.

About the book

Val and Milly meet while studying abroad in France. As the only two Black students on the trip, they form an immediate bond that grows into a deep friendship, one that feels more like sisterhood. They are also brought close to an older woman named Helene, who offers them affection, guidance and a glimpse of a different kind of life.

Years later, Val and Milly are in their thirties, married and preparing to welcome baby girls. When Milly invites Val to move to Brooklyn so they can raise their daughters together, it seems like an opportunity to reconnect and return to the closeness they once shared.

But time has changed them, the way time tends to change things.

Their lives now look very different. Milly has wealth, social status and a successful career as an influencer. Val is a journalist navigating her own ambitions, marriage and the demands of new motherhood. Differences in class, opportunity, expectations and personal circumstances begin to expose the cracks in their relationship. And the past they have tried to leave behind continues to shape the present.

Through the lives of these two women, Coster explores the beautiful, complicated and sometimes uncomfortable work of loving someone through different seasons of life.

What does this book ask us as Black women?

I think this novel invites us to look closely at the relationships that shape us, and the versions of ourselves we bring into them.

Friendship is love, but it is also work. It asks us to make room for change, to acknowledge differences and to be honest about the expectations we place on one another. Sometimes the people we love are growing in ways we don’t understand. Sometimes we are the ones changing. And sometimes the hardest part is accepting that closeness doesn’t always mean sameness.

For Black women, there is another layer worth exploring: the ways we find, create and sustain community. What does it mean to find sisterhood outside of blood ties? How do race, class and access shape our experiences of friendship? What happens when two women who once shared so much begin to experience the world very differently?

The book also invites us to think about motherhood and identity—not as experiences that define every woman, but as life transitions that can profoundly change how we see ourselves, our friendships and the people around us.

And perhaps one of the biggest questions is this: Can we allow the people we love to become someone different without feeling that we’ve lost them?

A few things to ponder as you read

As you make your way through Take What You Can, consider these questions:

What makes a friendship feel like sisterhood? Is love enough to sustain it?
How do our circumstances, access to resources and class differences shape the way we relate to one another?
Can a friendship survive when two people grow into very different versions of themselves?
What expectations do we place on our closest friends, and are those expectations always fair?
How do our relationships with our mothers—or the absence of those relationships—shape the ways we seek love, care and belonging?
What does it mean to show up for someone while still making room for your own needs and ambitions?
When does holding on to a friendship become more about preserving the past than honouring the people we are today?

And the question I want us to sit with:

How do we love people through change without losing ourselves in the process?

Reading together, reflecting together

One of the things I love about reading in community is that we don’t all arrive at a story from the same place. We bring different friendships, different histories, different experiences of family and different ideas about what it means to show up for the people we love.