Insufferable characters prevail in Friendship

Friendship Emily Gould Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Former Gawker co-editor and current co-owner of the ebookstore Emily Books, Emily Gould, 32, has been a target for controversy and abuse for close to a decade now. She made a name for herself by means of the perceived “over-sharing” nature of her blog Emily Magazine.

After years of telling what some have believed to be too much truth, Gould has shifted away from confession to fiction with her debut novel, Friendship, though the story still feels very much pulled from what Gould knows best. It is a slim novel about the close relationship between publishing-house coworkers turned “life partners,” Bev Tunney and Amy Schein.

Bev is still bleeding from a relationship gone terribly wrong, a now-temping MFA dropout who ends up pregnant as the result of an ill-advised one-night stand. Amy is her successful, supportive, yet wildly self-involved best friend who blogs at a Jewish site called Yidster until she unceremoniously quits in a bout of bad judgment.

Their relationship is penned with the same care and attention writers usually reserve for romantic love, the two bonded together with as much codependence as compassion.

Friendship is rife with the anxieties that exist on the precipice of female adulthood, with the pair popping klonopins, downing cocktails and vomiting in public, wondering where the careers and the men that they were promised are, as they navigate the myriad messes they find themselves in.

Friendship is an uneasy book, especially for those of us who see our own defects in Gould’s all-too-real characters. Much of their behaviour — their narcissism, pettiness, jealousy, selfishness, and betrayal — is as abhorrent as it is familiar, leaving the reader with the awkward feeling that Gould has created something true in all its ugliness.

Building realistic and robust female characters in this age bracket is a rarity, and in reading Friendship one is struck by how (sadly) innovative this simple story is. And despite how insufferable these women can be you grow glad they’re on the page, if only because it feels like they’ve never been allowed to be there before.