Carlene Bauer

In a certain sense, "Girls They Write Songs About" is a very new novel, in that it's central protagonists were born after the advent of second-wave feminism and were witnesses to its third wave. They are fully versed in the language of feminist struggle cognizant of how limited their mothers' lives were. They expect to do better, and their smart enough to justify giving it their best shot. It's also no small thing that this novel mentions events and years that I, a still-youngish middle-aged person, can actually remember. At one point, somebody takes a picture at Coney Island wearing a red velvet tracksuit. Oh, the nineties.

In another way, it's a very old novel. Jane Austen might have sympathized with Rose and Charlotte. When we meet them, they don't lack for beauty, charm, or ambition, but neither of them own any property or have trust funds, and New York certainly isn't getting any cheaper to live in. As gentrification progresses, it gets more and more expensive to be casually fashionable. These young women face a choice: do they marry a nice-enough man who has made real headway in the world -- or someone who already has enough cash in the bank to rent a private plane -- even if that means changing their bohemian ways and giving up on whatever unwritten books might still be somewhere inside them? How do you weigh a novel you might someday write against a child you might never have? The soundtrack is certainly different -- the Strokes, thank God -- do not rate a mention -- and the world has changed enough that either Rose or Charlotte might conceivably make it as a writer, but this novel takes pains to show that, in some ways, not much has changed for women since the early Victorian period.

I picked up "Girls They Write Songs About" because I was looking for something light, and what could be lighter than a story that revolves around two whip-smart aspiring pop-culture writers in fin-de-siecle New York? But Bauer's tone is careful and introspective throughout, and she spends less time discussing a male "them" than about exploring the inner spaces of Charlotte and Rose's close -- if tense and competitive -- friendship. Like many thinkers seem to be doing these days, "Girls They Write Songs About" questions whether marriage really is the thread that holds a life together. The husbands that both of these women choose seem nice enough, but that is, in itself, part of the problem. During the salad days of their friendship, Rose and Charlotte were more to each other: complements, rivals, sisters, confidants, muses, helpmates. The author depicts their relationship with uncommon skill, which makes it even harder for the reader to see them slowly drift apart. As they say, it's your friends who will break your heart. Recommended.… (meer)

Rose and Charlotte start out as rival writers for a counter-culture magazine, living frantic NYC it-girl lives in 1997, but find their mirror images in each other stomping on men's hearts, drinking too much, and fleeing their middle class childhoods and their destinies to become good suburban wives and mothers. This is such a vivid recounting of their mistakes and their abilities to forgive the other more than themselves, their saving the juiciest parts and most difficult questions for their best friend, all the while knowing that although their relationships with their husbands, children, and lovers may last, the golden best friendship will determine most of the decisions and the rules. Women of that era, women of this era, any woman with an exciting and scary life before marriage or career commitment will find this novel to be a pulsating gem.

Quotes: "All those musicians I interviewed went on and on about feeding off the energy of a crowd, and here was that adrenaline rush. The faces loved me, I could tell, and it felt a little like being tempted by Satan, to watch as you coaxed an audience into the palm of your hand, because if you were this good right now, you knew you could get it all the time if you wanted to. And I wanted to, wanted to, wanted to."

"We rolled our eyes at their husbands and the way they overexplained everything to their children as they walked into bodegas and out of the subway, as if they thought being a parent meant being a docent at the museum called Life."

"Rose and I were still on the same team: spies in the house of unexamined privilege."

"It takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Men don't walk around with a door inside them that they'll constantly have to worry about - should I shut it or keep it open?"… (meer)

Rose and Charlotte meet in New York, fresh from University and keen to explore all the city can offer. They form a strong friendship, linked through life, love and loss, until suddenly their lives start to diverge.
This book is touted as a great feminist novel of our times and that, in my opinion, is total hype. It's a solid enough novel of female relationships but it's nothing that's not be written before! To me, the characters are not inspiring, they are rather unlikable with a selfish hedonistic approach to life. The writing does depict this lifestyle in a tawdry way which fits. Luckily it didn't take a lot of reading but I was somewhat disappointed… (meer)