Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Friendship by Emily Gould

The agony and ecstasy of two close friends entering what the older and wiser are wont to call “real life” is at issue in Emily Gould’s astute, intoxicating Friendship. Lively and lightly mocking, it runs the gamut of urban 20-something experience, from unaffordable rent increases to dead-end jobs to lacklustre encounters with inappropriate suitors.

Bev has a yawning student loan and few job prospects, and her unpolished, perpetually disorganized mien explains her spotty work history. Amy is three years into a role at Yidster, “the third-most-popular online destination for cultural coverage with a modern Jewish angle”, not quite located in Manhattan and entirely unprofitable, funded as it is by the legacy of a family hosiery business. Her job consists mainly of tinkering with social media and some lackluster blogging. As a fictional proxy for every interesting point Gould has to make about the time-suck that is the internet, it is ideal.

Gould portrays both women as stuck in quasi-adolescence, educated but without the nous to navigate the day-to-day. While Amy yearns for true independence, her family’s financial safety net is hard to rebuff, and if untethered she is likely to be trapped by her carelessness with money. Her artist boyfriend Sam is organized and responsible, though unspontaneous. He is staying at her apartment, but there is no discussion as to the permanence or otherwise of the arrangement, and she is afraid to ask.

Bev views her friend rather differently than does the reader, envying Amy’s unworried attitude to money and her ability to obtain the essentials of life with little apparent effort. With ease, Gould debunks Bev’s mythology with subtle indicators that Amy’s life is being curtailed, shrinking in an almost imperceptible way, the author asking how we calculate potential. How do we know when a life’s promise is fulfilled? What is the cost of falling short?

An older couple, Sally and Jason, are grappling with infertility, and their chance meeting with Amy and Bev throws the women’s juvenilia into stark relief, whereupon Gould punts her narrative into fresh territory with a thrilling jolt. We’re in the same place and time, but the fundamentals have changed, so has the friendship, and entry into adulthood is no longer optional. How soon Amy reads the memo is another matter, and the typical daft behaviour of the young and self-absorbed is canvassed by Gould with wit and sympathy.

Though Friendship covers well-trampled ground, almost every about it feels new and insightful, largely thanks to Gould’s witty, unflinching approach to her characters and their circumstances. Though she is gentle with her young protagonists, as if to say, We’ve all been there, they are given no quarter and she makes no excuses. There is not a hero or villain in the bunch, and each one is fully alive, compelling despite their ordinariness and predictability.

The New York setting is no afterthought; few environments could be less forgiving of laziness or lack of direction, or of people who refuse to admit that money is both necessary and important. Sagacious without a trace of pomposity, Friendship is a spirited examination of an essential human connection.