Friendship (Gould)

Friendship:  A Novel
Emily Gould, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374158613


Summary
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 the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 13, 1981
• Raised—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Eugene Lang College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York


Emily Gould is an American author. She is the co-owner, with Ruth Curry, of the indie e-bookstore Emily Books, and the former co-editor of Gawker.com.

Gould grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Kenyon College for two years before transferring to Eugene Lang College in New York City. Gould resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Career
Gould began her blogging career as one-half of The Universal Review before starting her own blog, Emily Magazine, and writing for Gawker on a freelance basis. Before joining the Gawker staff, Gould was an associate editor at Disney's Hyperion imprint.

Gould is the co-author, with Zareen Jaffery, of the young adult novel Hex Education (2007). She is also the author of a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever (2010) and the novel, Friendship (2014).

Criticism
On April 6, 2007, Emily Gould appeared on an episode of Larry King Live hosted by talk show host Jimmy Kimmel during a panel discussion entitled "Paparazzi: Do they go too far?" During the interview, Kimmel accused Gould of irresponsible journalism resulting from Gould's popular blog, mentioning the possibility of assisting real stalkers and suggesting that Gould and her website could ultimately be responsible for someone's death. Kimmel continued to claim a lack of veracity in Gawker's published stories, and the potential for libel it presents. At the end of the exchange Gould stated that she didn't "think it was ok" for websites to publish false information, after which Kimmel said she should "check your website then."

On May 4, 2007, Gould wrote about the interview in an article for the New York Times. She penned another article for a New York Times Magazine cover story (May 25, 2008) about her experiences with Gawker, in which she described how the negative response to her television appearance led to panic attacks and subsequent psychotherapy. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/10/2014.)

Book Reviews
In Ms. Gould’s...often sharply observed first novel, Friendship...Amy and Bev have just crossed a microgenerational line into their 30s, and there’s a self-conscious, faintly melancholy tone to [the novel]: the girls’ sense of looking back on the turmoil (and, in Amy’s case, hubris) of their swiftly receding 20s with both alarm and nostalgia, worried that things are starting to add up, that the clock is ticking more loudly now, that the arithmetic of their lives is changing.... Depicting Amy and Bev in the third person gives Ms. Gould a measure of perspective on—and distance from—her characters, enabling her to depict their follies and foibles with a mixture of sympathy and humor. The novel form...also accentuates Ms. Gould’s strengths as a writer.... Whereas the blogs tended to create a self-portrait of the author as human word processor (automatically slicing, dicing and churning experience into prose), Friendship isn’t the simple spewing (or venting or whining or knee-jerk reacting) of an obsessive oversharer. Rather, at its best, it points to Ms. Gould’s abilities as a keen-eyed noticer and her knack for nailing down her ravenous observations with energy and flair.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Gould is holding up an ideal. Friendship, a slim, sometimes piercing novel, is a sharply observed chronicle of the inequality inherent in even the most valued friendships.
Alyssa Rosenberg - Washington Post


More than an exploration of friendship, this novel is about what happens when the things we take for granted slip away and we are forced to come up with new ways of being. For Amy and Bev, an unplanned pregnancy opens up a flood of questions that the women must wrestle with together, and, ultimately, individually.... Gould does a fine job capturing the women's frustrations, big and small, and the ways in which their friendship serves both as a hindrance and a means to maturing. But even if the writing is far superior to that commonly associated with commercial fiction, the novel's flippant tone—and the fact that it never really probes very far beneath the surface of what the characters are thinking—makes it read like a more highbrow version of chick lit. Call it literary chick lit.
Shoshana Olidort - Chicago Tribune


Gould’s strengths as a writer lie in her ability to portray contemporary women. Both main characters, who moved to Manhattan—well, Brooklyn—in order to conquer it often end up defeated.... Though Gould’s book is called Friendship it’s about much more than, as the main characters might say, BFFs. It’s about transitioning from idealistic youth to realistic adulthood, sacrificing freedom for stability, and abandoning creative lifestyles in order to craft sustainable lives.... Amy and Bev can be impulsive and oblivious. However, they’re recognizable to anyone who was ever told, as a child, that she could grow up to be anyone she wanted to be—and later struggled to figure out who that was.... Though Friendship is a modern tale astutely told, it offers the class-consciousness reminiscent of a Victorian novel.... Gould is a master of the telling detail or the ironic turn of phrase.... With Friendship, Gould establishes herself as a distinctively contemporary literary voice. Her dialogue resounds, and her dark humor gives texture to the prose. And though Friendship focuses on young women, readers need be neither young nor female in order to enjoy it.... This is a very human story for any of us who have ever been jealous of a friend or wished our friends were more jealous of us.
Christian Science Monitor


Work—sustained creativity, the problems of receiving too much attention, too fast and too young, paycheques, temp gigs, what it all might add up to and protect from—is as much a theme of the book as friendship is. The novel has a disarmingly for-real sense of these kinds of women’s lives, and features high-def, immersive verisimilitude about roommates, instant messages, storage units, job applications, buses, shirts, drinks and, largely, money; these are, of course, also the quotidian but hugely meaningful circumstances that create, maintain and end friendships, especially between women, especially in cities.... Adult female friendships act as load-bearing walls, but they’re also precarious: jealousy and judgments can rip them open in a day; errors in the careful balance sheet of neediness and interest in the other one’s day undo years of emotional work. ‘Sharply observed’ is a gross cliché, but Friendship is Gould seeing and understanding the small and mounting details of what women like her want, what they have to do to get it, and what they do to ruin everything. Gould’s first, best talent...is to see things as they are, like a craftsperson, like a writer of novels has to see them.
Kate Carraway - The Globe and Mail (Toronto)


There is a sentimental delight in reading Friendship and its roller coaster ride of urban highs and lows.... In the end, Gould draws a vivid and convincing portrait of a friendship—in all of its human misunderstandings, disappointments, and brokenness.... It is no small feat to animate and chart the emotional fluctuations and subtle contours of female friendships on the page.... [Gould] illuminate[s] what it means to grow up together and then sometimes apart.
S. Kirk Walsh - Virginia Quarterly Review


Gould’s novel is admirably, readably realistic—she knows these girls and the world they live in (including the omnipresence of technology and the way that it pervades relationships).... Gould nails the complex blend of love, loyalty, and resentment that binds female friends. It is worth reading for the richness of its details (at one point, Amy is overwhelmed by the desire to put an engaged coworker’s wedding ring in her mouth), and it offers new insight into the experience of young women.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Plot takes a back seat to Gould’s razor-sharp humor and observations about life in New York among a class of young people who know more about how they’d like to live than how to pay for it. It’s also a delight to read a novel that places female friendship at its center; we watch Bev and Amy manage their fluctuating feelings of love, jealousy and sometimes disdain for each other...[as] Gould brilliantly charts their ups and downs.
Kirkus Reviews

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