The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry and Romance at Disturbingly Close Quarters

Certainly thorough and wide-ranging, these anecdotal portraits of good roommates and bad roommates have been smoothly edited by Wu (a culture editor at Town & Country and founder of MochiMag.com) for understated readability. These briefs are occasionally hilarious: in “The Faulty Wiring” a college roommate climbs on top of her desk at night and pees on her own laptop, then wonders the next morning if the electricity had gone out. Elsewhere, incidents possess an over-the-top quality that strains credulity, such as the depiction of Midwestern Sandra in “The Multiple Personalities,” who suffered from dissociative identity disorder and whose five other church-going roommates made peace with Sandra’s various personalities (with names like Blue Eyes and Playgirl, for example) and even attended therapy with her. Divided into life stages such as “Growing Pains,” “Freshman Year,” and “Recent Grads,” the tales cover the gamut from sharing dorms in small college towns to roach-infested pads in New York City or RV traveling, while the most eclectic section, “Adventures Abroad,” even attains an inspired quality, as in the strange and beautiful influence one Botswana roommate wrought over her American counterpart in “The African Exchange Student.” There are, curiously, several essays about living with Mormons, lots of party boys and girls, bed bugs, suicide attempts, and kleptomaniacs, but mostly there remain the all-too-familiar, agonizing chronicles of the passive- aggressives and the plain incompatibles. (Sept.)