Tag: Friends

Reunion by Elise Juska (Literary Fiction)

June 2021 — Three friends anticipate a Covid postponed college reunion at the Maine campus. Hope — a stay at home mom with an increasingly distant husband — is desperate to return to what she remembers as her happiest time; Adam looks forward to reconnecting but feels guilt at leaving his perpetually sad wife with the twins in the house that she hasn’t left in a very long time; and NYC based single-mom Polly who doesn’t share her friends fond memories, but is persuaded to attend by her reclusive son who wants to visit a nearby friend.

This character-driven novel explores friendships and personal growth against the backdrop of lock down parenting and recovery alongside some pretty intense environmental anxiety. With every relationship comes inevitable clashes and this story covers quite a few. I particularly “enjoyed” the generational clashes — some familiar and some brand new to me as successive generations bear less and less in common with my own. Well written probes into the evolution of friendships
— what connects people with little in common and what decisions can impact the closeness over time. I really liked that the ending for all of our protagonists had a closure that was more about understanding the nature of their issues, thereby clarifying a path towards closure, rather than any kind of quick solution to the problem itself — because there really are no quick solutions to relationship issues…

One kind of funny (to me) quote as Hope thinks about her teenage daughter Izzy: “Meanwhile, Izzy was skeptical of all things where Hope was concerned. Her Spotify list. Her low-carb bread. Her Facebook posts — too frequent, too obviously curated — why was she even on Facebook? Her overuse of exclamation points. Her leather tote. Sometimes Hope secretly wondered if Izzy had become a vegan primarily to get on her nerves.”

Thank you to Harper and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on May 11th, 2024.

Generation Friends by Saul Austerlitz (Entertainment Industry)

A fun read for those of us who are big Friends fans (and apparently there are a lot of us). I’m not a big TV person — I don’t have cable, and usually just watch a single movie on DVD at night — but I loved Friends, owned all the DVDs, and it was definitely my go to in times of stress. I just never realized how popular it was with everyone else.

The book tracks the show from concept through the ten seasons to the offshoots, residuals, and “where are they now” recaps. Decent (and sometimes excellent) writing, a good structure, and comprehensive in scope, it has just the right amount of gossip and mixes plenty of pleasant recognition with surprisingly fresh insights. I also learned a lot about the making of TV — scheduling, showrunners, production companies vs networks, bidding wars, contract negotiations and some fascinating explanations of what went into the set and costume design.

I liked the first half better — the second half included a lot of bits that needed to be included to be complete but weren’t terribly interesting to me — one female writer’s hostile workplace suit, Matthew Perry’s addiction issues, etc. I didn’t always agree with the author’s conclusions, and sometimes felt there was too much episode recap, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed myself and learned a lot about how things work in an industry far away from my own.

Some fun quotes:
“Chase and Ungerleider had emerged from the same bookish East Coast Jewish milieu as Kauffman and Crane. Chase knew he could instantly summon that overly caffeinated, verbose, linguistically tricky voice.”

“Journalists pored over the results with the nuance of elderly Talmudists, intent on parsing the meaning of the message being sent by the American moviegoing populace.”

“Neither Crane nor Kauffman was familiar with the term going commando, but when the entire staff urged them to include it, asserting that their audience would instantly understand the reference, they acceded. (Eventually, the Oxford English Dictionary would credit Friends with one of the earliest recorded usages of the term.)”

“The world of Friends is notable, to modern eyes,” wrote New York’s Sternergh, “for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism.”

Thank you to Penguin Group Dutton and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 17th, 2019.