Friendship

Gould, Emily

Ryan

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

Virago

Friendship: A Novel

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.

Literature & Fiction

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Literary

A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year · A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice · Named a Best Book of the Year by Vol. 1 Brooklyn and The Globe and Mail (Canada)
 Emily Gould's debut novel is a searching examination of a best friendship that is at once profoundly recognizable and impossible to put down. 
Bev Tunney and Amy Schein have been best friends for years, but now, at thirty, they're at a crossroads. Bev is a hardworking Midwesterner still mourning a years-old romantic catastrophe that derailed her career. Amy is an East Coast princess, whose luck and charm have, so far, allowed her to skate through life. Bev is stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of temping, drowning in student loan debt, and (still) living with roommates. Amy is 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 the two are dragged, kicking and screaming, into real adulthood, they are confronted with the possibility that growing up might also mean growing apart.

Picador

Product Description 
"An intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation" (Stephanie Danler). 
Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? 
It's the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City's East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she's just beginning to book gigs with her beautiful best friend when she falls hard for a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. Their time together is stormy and short-lived--but will reverberate for the rest of Laura's life. 
Fifteen years later, Laura's teenage daughter, Marie, is asking questions about her father, questions that Laura does not want to answer. Laura has built a stable life in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to the one she envisioned when she left Ohio all those years ago, and she's taken pains to close the door on what was and what might have been. But neither her best friend, now a famous musician who relies on Laura's songwriting skills, nor her depressed and searching daughter will let her give up on her dreams. 
"A zippy and profound story of love, loss, heredity, and par-enthood (Emma Straub), 
Perfect Tunes explores the fault lines in our most important relationships, and asks whether dreams deferred can ever be reclaimed. It is a delightful and poignant tale of music and motherhood, ambition and com-promise--of life, in all its dissonance and harmony. 
 Review 
"[A] poignant story about the hard and intangibly enriching work of motherhood. . . . Anyone familiar with Gould's work will be unsurprised by her keen eye. . . . The pleasure of this book is in Gould's astute details about everything from a hangover (which made Laura's head feel like a "black banana") to relationships. . . . Her writing is observant and unfussy, and she has a knack for addressing serious subjects, such as the hardships of parenting and the darkness of depression, while keeping things light."\n--Emily Bobrow, The Washington Post 
 "What has remained consistent throughout Gould's career is her ability to understand, amplify, and explore the essence of a moment, in turn offering her readers the opportunity to better understand the exigencies of life, those weird after-effects that ripple out from a major catastrophe. 
Perfect Tunes has many of those big before-and-after moments and many of those rippling after-effects; it shows the ways in which we are all, always, having to reimagine the story of our lives. . . . Through it all, Gould's insights into what makes up the sometimes barely perceptible beats of our lives are sensitive and spot-on."\n--Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 
 " 
Perfect Tunes is a cautionary tale about a lesser-discussed form of intergenerational trauma. . . . Gould, in the end, is not suggesting that oft-told myth that motherhood makes artistic life impossible; she is showing, through Laura and Marie's relationship, how unexpressed creativity can become as painful to carry as unpumped breast milk."\n--Lindsay Zoladz, Bookforum 
 " 
Perfect Tunes is an intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation. From the obsessive spark of first love to the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, Emily Gould captures life's ups, downs, and in-betweens with wisdom and wry humor, giving us one of the great New York coming-of-age stories."\n--Stephanie Danler 
 " 
Perfect Tunes is mind-blowing. I have yet to read any text longer than like one page by Emily Gould in which she doesn't articulate something I often thought, or felt, but never previously articulated or acknowledged. She is brilliant and fearless. Her take on mothers and daughters, and daughters' boyfriends, and daughters' boyfriends' mothers, and daughters' daughters boyfriends, is full of unspeakable insights, or at leas

Perfect Tunes (Thorndike Press Large Print Softcover Romance and Women's Fiction)

Thorndike Press Large Print

Essays by former editor of Gawker.com-and the new female voice of her generation. In And the Heart Says Whatever, Emily Gould tells the truth about becoming an adult in New York City in the first decade of the twenty-first century, alongside bartenders, bounty hunters, bloggers, bohemians, socialites, and bankers. These are essays about failing at pet parenthood, suspending lust during the long moment in which a dude selects the perfect soundtrack from his iTunes library, and leaving one life behind to begin a new one (but still taking the G train back to visit the old one sometimes) For everyone who has ever had a job she wishes she didn't, felt inchoate ambition sour into resentment, ended a relationship, regretted a decision, or told a secret to exactly the wrong person, these stories will be achingly familiar. At once a road map of what not to do and a document of what's possible, this book heralds the arrival of a writer who decodes the new challenges of our post-private lives, and the age-old intricacies of the human heart.

And the Heart Says Whatever

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Free Press

Perfect Tunes

Contemporary

Scribner UK

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