A book about 3 college friends in their 30’s coming to terms with being grown ups in NYC.

I’m not twenty-one, Mama. We don’t have time in life to start that kind of endless conversation (the “why don’t you like my boyfriend type”). Besides, I don’t know if I want to know. All my life people have been jealous of me for one thing or another, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t notice, and I’m tired of feeling guilty about it. And the whole point about Danielle was that I never had to pretend before. I don’t want to be pretending.

Seriously. It’s narcissism, to love a wall and resent it for not loving you back. It’s perversity. Love is mutual, it flourishes in reciprocity. You can’t have real love without a return of affection – otherwise, it’s just an obsession, and projection. It’s childish.

Danielle reflected that growing up, coupling was a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe in the same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolation and struggle and fear bearable, was replaced by the stolid matter of stability: nominally content, resigned and unafraid, one grew to fear jokes and their capacity to unsettle. Where there had been laughter thre came a cold breeze. What, after all, was Julius doing shacked up with a golf-loving businessman? A year ago, he would himself guffawed at the notion. All of them, all three of them: a year ago, they’d been still linked, inexorably and, they’d thought, forever. It was supposedly better this way – each of them had found her heart’s desire – but did they laugh as they had done for so many years? Would they ever laugh that way again, or was it over now, in the Realm of Adult Sobriety?

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