Girls They Write Songs About
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep
What happens when growing up means growing apart?
1997. New York.
Earnest, bookish Rose.
Brash, extrovert Charlotte.
When they moved to New York in the late nineties, coffee cost less than a dollar and you could still smoke in bars. You could stay up drinking all night, sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape.
Everyone has their own New York, and for Rose and Charlotte it was a place to feed their ambition, a place to dance and party and fall in love, far from the suburbs they once called home. It was New York City, and it was everything they ever wanted.
Their friendship was different too: intense and life-changing. The kind that only happens once. The kind that couldn't last forever.
In Carlene Bauer's exuberant novel, Rose and Charlotte look back and reckon with the loss of a friendship that helped define them, shaping their lives more than any love affair.
'Excellent... Full of texture and feeling.' Vivian Gornick
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bauer's appealing if aimless latest (after Frances and Bernard) follows the friendship of two women in New York City from the late 1990s through the aughts. Charlotte Snowe and Rose Pellegrino apply for a staff editor job at a music magazine, and that's where they meet; Rose gets the job and Charlotte eventually gets hired as an editor. The two quickly develop a close bond, but jealousies both romantic and professional eventually rear their heads. When Rose sets aside her writing commitments to marry Peter, Charlotte takes it as a personal affront and it eventually becomes a wedge between them, and as one ascends in her career, the other's decline is put into greater relief. There's not much of a plot, just a bunch of time in bars, clubs, and restaurants and conversations that don't quite pass the Bechdel test (lots of talk about men, their bosses, relationships, and sex), and by the end it just sort of fizzles out. Still, Bauer has a talent for exacting language, particularly when describing the characters' attempts at navigating an era in which it feels like feminism is over ("We were neither selfish enough nor selfless enough to become heroines"). There are better stories of moving to the city, but this makes for a charming enough time capsule.
