The Tennis Partner

David Smith was once one of the most promising tennis players in America. Now he is a medical student in El Paso, Texas — brilliant, charming, and fighting a cocaine addiction that has already cost him everything once and is preparing to take the rest. Abraham Verghese met him on a tennis court when they were both new to the city, and what grew between them was one of the most extraordinary friendships in recent memoir.

The Tennis Partner is the story of that friendship — and of what it means to watch someone you admire destroy themselves with something they cannot control. Verghese brings to the book both the clinical precision of one of America’s most distinguished physicians and the emotional intelligence of a writer who genuinely loves his subject and cannot look away from his suffering.

This is a book about addiction that explains it better than any clinical manual — from the inside, with compassion and devastating accuracy. It is also a book about friendship, about medicine, about the impossibility of saving someone who will not be saved. Widely regarded as one of the finest American memoirs of the 1990s and still, twenty-five years later, impossible to read without being moved. Published by Vintage.