Forget Valentine’s Day, with apologies to my husband… this week I’ll be celebrating Galentine’s Day, a portmanteau that sounds a
little silly but points to something essential—friends matter! Celebrating platonic love among girlfriends is central to my new novel Clutch, which introduces readers to five women, friends since college, twenty years out, as they’re converging for their first post-Covid get together. They’re all at or near critical junctures in their careers, they’re all negotiating struggles at home. Do they have the bandwidth to help one another, even as they’re struggling to stay afloat? You’ll have to read to find out!
But I’m not the only author to celebrate long-term, indelible friendships… here is a round up a few of my favorite books about unforgettable friends, to read and share with all the platonic loves in your life.
The Group by Mary McCarthy
McCarthy spent a decade imagining the lives of her “Vassar Eight”—a group of class of 1933 friends who enter into New York at the peak of the Depression. The characters are stubborn and ambitious, the social critique is unsparing and the book resonated with readers in 1963 staying on the bestseller list for two years. We’re nearly a century after the present action of this novel, and sixty years post-publication, but the women’s struggles with gender expectations, individual ambitions and class as they set out in the world feel prescient today.
Stay True by Hua Hsu
This memoir isn’t about gals, admittedly, but it does explore the idea of making friends in college—in this case, at University of California Berkeley in the late 1990s— and how those friendships can shape a whole life. I was bowled over by how beautifully Hsu captured the intimacy of coming of age together, and what is lost when you lose a friend in a heartbreaking, unexpected way. I wasn’t the only one who found this story captivating—it won a Pulitzer in 2023.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Again, this isn’t a gals-only tale, but I was wowed by how Zevin tracked a complicated friendship across decades. In this case, Sadie and Sam are friends from childhood who reunite in college and develop a videogame together. Sam’s friend Marx joins their working pod, but of course things get complicated with friendship, love and ambition in the mix. The friendships here are messy and mad, but ultimately really touching.
Plays Well with Others by Allan Gurganus
This book is about a group of creative young creatives who find each other in New York during the early 1980s and what happens when they confront the AIDS crisis. Gurganus is unflinching and honest about how AIDS impacts the group, who have staked so much on “making it” in New York. Gurganus’s language is unforgettably inventive, his heart is huge and these characters are tremendously funny and loving.
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
In Flournoy’s latest novel, we follow four friends through adulthood, watching as they lose their elders and find their chosen family. The friends struggle to build and sustain relationships as geography, class and social mores try to get in the way. Flournoy is sharp-eyed and honest about how friends can love and hurt one another at the same time, how they strive to support one another despite all the external challenges that can get in the way.