First published 2012
Clover arrives at her twentieth Harvard reunion carrying the weight of unemployment and fertility struggles. Her former roommates Addison, Mia, and Jane gather with their own burdens. Addison's marriage to a blocked writer crumbles while her trust fund dwindles. Mia renovates houses she cannot afford after Hollywood rejected her acting dreams. Jane mourns her war correspondent husband while her current relationship fractures. The four women shared a dorm until 1989, when they scattered into different worlds. Clover left her commune background for Wall Street before Lehman Brothers collapsed. Addison abandoned her Mayflower pedigree to pursue art and love. Mia traded her brilliant stage performances for suburban motherhood. Jane, a Vietnamese war orphan, built her identity through journalism until budget cuts shuttered her Paris bureau. For twenty years, they tracked each other through Harvard's red book, those sanitized alumni reports published every five years. But reunion weekend strips away the careful narratives they crafted for public consumption. Real stories emerge as old friends confront the gap between their college dreams and middle aged realities.
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, family-drama, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Harvard, Paris, Wall Street
Period: 1989, 2009
347 pages · Hardcover · Voice