The Epic Real-Life Friendship Behind ‘Heart the Lover’

On a leafy stretch of North Street, just a few blocks from the storied brick walkways of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus, an extraordinary friendship took root. Here, in a rented house, two college guys—joined almost constantly by a close friend from his fraternity—forged bonds that would echo through decades, inspiring a bestselling novel and reminding us of the enduring magic of Carolina connections.

These three, all English majors who had traveled from other states, were formidable intellects and avid readers. Individually, they might have seemed unassuming, but together, J.B., Jeff, and Kevin were a witty, free-flowing, and utterly magnetic force, embodying the intellectual spark that defines Chapel Hill.

Their North Street house became a legendary hub, a magnet for fellow Tar Heels drawn to the vibrant banter and stimulating conversation. These juniors and seniors, 20 or 21 years old, debated everything from the trivialities of student life to the grandest philosophical concepts. They parried verbally, dissecting their professors’ lectures, sharing recent literary discoveries, and dissecting the news of the day, all under the spell of Carolina blue skies.

Among those captivated was Lily King, another out-of-state English major, who encountered their unique world during her own Carolina years in the mid-1980s.

“Our university was big, but these three guys had created a tiny, cozy world within it,” King recounted in a 2020 article in Vogue. “The rest of the fall and winter we played Hearts and argued about Reagan’s reelection; we talked in Irish accents and quoted James Joyce … With the three of them, I was always giddy from the banter.”

King’s vivid recollections extended to a poignant love triangle that formed between her, J.B., and Jeff. She first dated J.B., whom she met in a 17th-century literature class, but ultimately found herself falling for Jeff.

These deeply personal, Chapel Hill-rooted memories became the inspiration for King’s critically acclaimed novel, Heart the Lover, published last year. The book garnered warm reviews from literary giants like The New York Times and The Washington Post, with TIME magazine ranking it first in its list of the 10 best books of the year. Many North Carolinians, especially UNC alumni, recognized echoes of their own campus days in its pages.

“What begins as the hormone-fueled story of a campus love triangle, punctuated by bad sex and the heady banter of English majors, reveals itself to hold far greater weight,” wrote TIME’s Lucy Feldman, capturing the novel’s profound emotional depth.

However, neither the real-life story nor King’s fictionalized account concludes with a conventionally happy ending. Kevin Wolf tragically succumbed to lymphoma in 2001 at the age of 38. Jeff Darsie passed away from lung cancer in 2019 at 56. J.B. Howard, the steadfast third member of their triumvirate, was by both their sides in their final days. (Disclosure: Howard has been a good friend since college, and I knew Wolf and Darsie through him; I never met King at UNC-CH.)

The novel has sparked a quiet buzz across North Carolina’s alumni networks, igniting conversations among old college friends, now in their 60s, about the blurred lines between fiction and truth. But what remains undeniably real, and profoundly resonant for anyone who cherishes college friendships, is the extraordinary male bond King so beautifully portrays in Heart the Lover.

“It’s three guys who loved each other,” reflects their friend Jeb Saunders, a state government lawyer who still calls Chapel Hill home. “But for Kevin and Jeff dying, they would have remained life-long friends. What a gift that was to have that friendship at such a young age.”

Their collective imprint on King was indelible, shaping her perspective even decades after their vibrant Chapel Hill days.

“I don’t know that I see that quality of male friendship very often,” she told me. “I don’t know how much in everyday life men really lean on each other and care for each other.”

The Triumvirate

J.B. Howard’s first impression of Kevin Wolf, during a Chapel Hill visit as high school seniors, was far from friendly. Both were finalists for the prestigious Morehead Scholarship, bringing them to UNC’s campus in late February. Howard, from Baltimore, found Wolf, from New Jersey, an “insufferably arrogant northeasterner” who strolled the hallowed campus with his nose in the air.

Yet, six months later, fate brought them together as fellow Morehead Scholars in Old East dorm, just steps from the iconic Old Well, UNC’s most beloved landmark. This time, they clicked. Howard later wrote to friends that Wolf “turned out to be the most good-hearted, caring, and interesting friend anyone could ever have.”

Darsie, a passionate reader and horse-racing enthusiast from Kentucky, also resided in the historic dorm. The trio quickly discovered a wealth of shared interests. An unforgettable October night saw them stay up talking until dawn—the beginning of a conversation that would span years, rooted in the fertile intellectual ground of Chapel Hill.

Their friends at Carolina consistently marveled at their intellects and insatiable curiosity.

“They were really impressive,” remembers Tim Sullivan, a UNC alumnus who became the CEO of Ancestry.com and now lives in Chapel Hill (Sullivan is a member of The Assembly’s board). “They were the reminder to me of why we were here [at the university]. They so clearly admired each other as friends and respected each other.”

Wolf, the most extroverted of the three, was known for his zany antics, famously calling himself the “Wolf Man” and humorously exaggerating his dating prowess. His friends, chuckling, agree that the character in King’s novel based on Wolf (named Ivan) perfectly captures his spirited essence.

In the novel, Ivan/Kevin returns to their unnamed college town after a summer spent in Ireland, brimming with tales.

“Then he tells us about the landlord’s daughter, the ferryman’s sister, and a pretty French girl on the flight home who told him in a sexy accent if they didn’t hold hands during takeoff the plane would crash,” writes the female narrator. “But once they were safely in the air she let go and refused to speak to him for the rest of the flight. He is amused that everything he says delights us.”

Wolf’s adventurous spirit extended to academics; he taught himself Mandarin Chinese, becoming fluent. Later, he moved to Hong Kong, pursuing “beautiful Asian women” with a zeal Howard described as “as ardent and quixotic as it was hilarious.”

“I adored Kevin,” said Carolyn Griffin Hall, a Chapel Hill regular at the North Street house now a community volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee. “He was so funny. He was like a little quirky gnome. He was delightful and super smart.”

While Wolf was exuberance personified, Darsie possessed an endearing, self-deprecating humor about his own predicaments and quirks.

His six-page handwritten letter (always on a yellow legal pad) to a former professor in 1995 exemplifies classic Darsie. He recounted the tender, yet ultimately humorous, experience of reading Dylan Thomas’ nostalgic poem “Fern Hill” to his dying father, wheelchair-bound in his Kentucky farmhouse, with his brother and stepmother present.

Jeff Darsie began bravely, but was overcome with emotion, aiming to perfectly deliver this poignant farewell. He struggled, but ultimately finished:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying 

Though I sang in my chains like the sea

He believed his family was deeply moved—until he realized they were actually struggling to suppress laughter. “Y’all was grateful and relieved when I started laughing also,” Darsie wrote, perfectly capturing his unique charm.

Howard, the quietest of the three, was a dual English and Classics major, immersed in the foundational Greek and Latin authors. Remarkably, he also served as backup goalie on a UNC-Chapel Hill men’s lacrosse team that claimed a national championship.

Howard cut a distinct figure amidst his team of rough-and-tumble athletes. While teammate Saunders grew his hair long to fit in, Howard remained steadfast in his fumbling, over-caffeinated, coffee-drinking persona and his daily uniform of button-down oxford cloth shirts and khakis. Though quirky, he exuded a measured, mature-beyond-his-years self-possession. His teammates respected him for it, many considering him the most intriguing personality on the squad.

Louise Gilbert Freeman, an artist and former college English professor now living in Virginia, shared friendships with Darsie since prep school and with all three during their Chapel Hill days. She and her college friends affectionately dubbed them “The Triumvirate.”

“They were intellectual compatriots, but they were also bonded in the way typical of male college friends—lots of jocular ribbing, a shared private lexicon,” she wrote in an unpublished essay after Darsie died. “I was flattered to be included somewhere in that charmed circle, even as a ripple at the outer rim. I cared so much what they thought of me.”

Lean on Me

Their bond, forged in the crucible of Carolina, remained strong long after graduation. All three pursued law degrees, Wolf and Darsie at the University of Michigan, and Howard at the University of Virginia.

Wolf embarked on an international law career in Hong Kong before returning to the U.S., never marrying. Darsie’s on-again, off-again romance with King spanned a decade, ultimately transitioning into a deep friendship as he remained single. Howard married, had three sons (one named after Darsie), and later divorced.

Despite divergent paths, the trio diligently carved out time to see each other at least a half-dozen times a year. They reunited in bustling New York City, on serene beaches, at weddings, and even on a cycling trip through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, always reconnecting to the easy camaraderie born in Chapel Hill.

“There was always something to look forward to,” Howard recently told me. “We all found each other interesting in some way. It’s a unique friendship when you can create this world that you’re happy in with two other friends.”

He added, “I liked being around two guys who were really, really smart, and smarter than I was. We pushed each other in that way.” He emphasized that theirs was a truly three-way friendship; never was one excluded by the others.

Only death could break their circle. Wolf’s cancer diagnosis in the late 1990s brought Howard and Darsie even closer, as they researched his illness, arranged visits with old friends, and provided unwavering encouragement. On a train journey to New York to visit Wolf, Darsie somberly remarked to Howard, “Do you realize how hard this is going to be when he dies?”

“Kevin fought really, really hard,” Howard recounted. Wolf endured a grueling period of chemo and radiation, oscillating between hope and despair. He passed away in New Jersey in 2001, with Darsie and Howard by his side, a testament to their unbreakable bond.

Wolf’s death, when they were in their late 30s, solidified Darsie and Howard’s already strong friendship. For over a decade, both worked for the Maryland attorney general, seeing each other regularly, with Darsie becoming a cherished “Uncle Jeff” to Howard’s three sons.

Years prior, in their youth, Darsie’s romance with King had indeed strained their friendship. King and Howard parted ways at the end of his senior year in 1985, long before the advent of the Internet and cell phones. When Howard returned to the U.S. from a summer trip to Europe, he discovered his close friend and his former girlfriend, both still students, were now dating.

He was angry, he told me, not because he harbored hopes of rekindling his relationship with King, but because he felt Darsie had violated an unwritten, almost Hemingway-esque, code of masculine friendship: a man simply didn’t date his close friend’s ex, especially immediately after their breakup.

King was acutely aware of this unspoken tension. She and Darsie consciously kept their relationship entirely separate from his friendship with Howard. If Howard was in town and the guys went to a party, she knew she couldn’t join. If Darsie called Howard, King ensured she wasn’t in the room.

In both her Vogue article and her novel, King describes their predicament in strikingly similar terms: Darsie risked losing his friendship with Howard if he chose King; conversely, King would lose Darsie if he prioritized Howard. It was a complex emotional knot, born on a Carolina campus.

While it might have seemed an insurmountable challenge at the time, in the end, Howard and Darsie (and Wolf) remained inextricably close. Darsie’s romance with King “created a real strain on my friendship with Jeff,” Howard acknowledged in a recent email to friends. “But there was no force in the universe that was going to break our friendship with each other and with Kevin.”

One Night Only

Darsie, a lifelong smoker, received his cancer diagnosis in late 2016. Howard, ever the loyal friend, accompanied him to doctor’s visits. When Darsie was hospitalized for the final time in March 2019 in Baltimore, Howard became his constant vigil, sleeping for several weeks on a fold-out chair in the room, constantly consulting with Darsie’s doctors and nurses about his treatment.

Howard also urged King, who lives in Maine, to visit—and quickly. When she arrived, she walked into a raucous party in the hospital room, an NCAA tournament basketball game blaring from the TV amidst cheering and shouting. Darsie was in bed, hooked up to oxygen, his chest exposed, yet utterly joyous to be surrounded by the people he loved most, a testament to the spirited bonds forged years ago.

Darsie, witty to the end, cracked jokes. Someone suggested he should do stand-up comedy.

“Yeah,” he responded, according to one of his friends. “‘Jeff Darsie—One Night Only.’”

Y’all in that room during Darsie’s last week felt a profound, almost mystic power. Freeman, his friend from prep school, noted that Darsie allowed his friends to see him raw and exposed, stripping them of everything superficial or extraneous, revealing the pure essence of their connection.

The parade of visitors eventually dissipated one night. King writes movingly in the Vogue article about being alone with Howard and Darsie in his last hours, sensing Wolf’s spirit joining them. “His evil grin and cackle laugh—he came back then and sat in the room with us,” she wrote. “I could hear him shuffling the cards.”

King’s hospital visit marked her first time seeing Howard in decades. He was incredibly kind, warm, and grateful for her presence, “even though I’d almost ruined their friendship decades ago,” she reflected. The distance of years offered her a new perspective on the complex dynamics of their Carolina past.

She’d never truly considered her romance with Darsie from Howard’s point of view. What if her best friend had started dating Darsie as soon as she left town? Would she have forgiven her? Would King have slept in her hospital room night after night, as Howard had?

King told me that being with Darsie and the others at the end was “heartbreaking and excruciatingly beautiful all at the same time.” She felt profoundly honored and privileged to be included in those final, sacred moments, a part of a bond that started in Chapel Hill and transcended time.

As a novelist, King said, “You have to let the characters do what they’re going to do.” But she emphasized her desire to capture Darsie’s essence, as well as his unique friendship with Howard—a quality of male camaraderie she’d never witnessed before. That enduring friendship, born under the Carolina sky, is truly the heart of her celebrated book, a sentiment she wholly embraces.

As Darsie lay dying, Howard created a Facebook page, “Darse World,” a virtual gathering place for friends and family to honor and reminisce about him. After his passing, Howard posted movingly about their friendship with Wolf, ensuring their compatriot would not be forgotten. He had lost contact with Wolf’s family over the years. But when he reached out in the spring of 2019, Wolf’s siblings and mother traveled to the Baltimore hospital to visit Darsie one last time, a testament to the interwoven lives.

Howard believed he was holding it all together at the hospital, but upon seeing the Wolf family, the floodgates opened. Their presence was a powerful reminder of the pain and joy of a friendship that began long ago on an October night in an old dorm, three freshmen filled with excitement about finding their way forward in a new world full of promise, all rooted in the unique spirit of Chapel Hill.

“Kevin and Jeff are together now,” he wrote. “I can’t wait to see them again.”