A novel about two friends learning the difference between getting older and growing up

Bev Tunney and Amy Schein have been best friends for years; now, at thirty, they’re at a crossroads. Bev is a Midwestern striver still mourning a years-old romantic catastrophe. Amy is an East Coast princess whose luck and charm have too long allowed her to cruise through life. Bev is stuck in circumstances that would have barely passed for bohemian in her mid-twenties: temping, living with roommates, drowning in student-loan debt. Amy is still riding the tailwinds of her early success, but her habit of burning bridges is finally catching up to her. And now Bev is pregnant.
As Bev and Amy are dragged, kicking and screaming, into real adulthood, they have to face the possibility that growing up might mean growing apart.
Friendship, Emily Gould’s debut novel, traces the evolution of a friendship with humor and wry sympathy. Gould examines the relationship between two women who want to help each other but sometimes can’t help themselves; who want to make good decisions but sometimes fall prey to their own worst impulses; whose generous intentions are sometimes overwhelmed by petty concerns.
This is a novel about the way we speak and live today; about the ways we disappoint and betray one another. At once a meditation on the modern meaning of maturity and a timeless portrait of the underexamined bond that exists between friends, this exacting and truthful novel is a revelation.

From Booklist

Best pals Bev and Amy are about to hit 30, and neither woman is where she wants to be. When Bev and Amy met years earlier at a publishing house, their futures were bright. But then Bev followed a guy to Wisconsin only to have him cheat on her, while Amy gained notoriety as a blogger until she pissed off the wrong person and lost her job. Now Bev is temping and living with three roommates, while Amy is halfheartedly working for the Jewish blog Yidster and dating a sexy slacker artist. They’re pretty much coasting until Bev has a one-night stand and winds up pregnant. As Bev wrestles with her choices, Amy concocts a plan to persuade Sally, a woman she and Bev house-sat for, to adopt Bev’s baby but grows envious when Bev and Sally grow close. Gould follows her essay collection, And the Heart Says … Whatever (2010), with a savvy first novel that, in piercing prose, zeroes in on modern ennui and the catalysts that force even the most apathetic out of their complacency

Books in the “Andrea” bookshelf created by Christina Ramtung