'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep A fabulous power ballad to female friendship, Girls They Write Songs About is a thrumming, searching novel about the bonds that shape us more than any love affair Rose and Charlotte arrive in 1990s New York, fresh out of university and fizzing with ambition. When they end up working at the same music magazine, Charlotte - earnest, bookish - is wary of brash, outspoken Rose. But hesitancy soon gives way to a unique friendship that will change both girls forever. Determined to take advantage of every day in this exasperating, jubilant city, their lives become entirely entwined. Together they find love and lose it, hit their strides and stumble, see each other through marriages, motherhood, divorces, career glories and catastrophes. But what happens when your lives start to fall out of sync? What does it mean to give up on the dreams that held a friendship together? As smart and comic as it is gloriously exuberant, Girls They Write Songs About takes a timeless story and turns it into a pulsing, wrecking, clear-eyed tale of two friends reckoning with the lives they've chosen, and the countless ways all the women they've known have made them who they are.

Frances and Bernard meet in the summer of 1957. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can change the course of our lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. The city is a wonderland for young people with dreams: cramped West Village kitchens, parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all, long talks along the Hudson as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above. Inspired by the lives of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell, "Frances and Bernard" imagines, through new characters with charms entirely their own, what else might have happened. In the grandness of the fall, can we love another person so completely that we lose our dreams? In witness to all the wonder of kindred spirits and bittersweet romance,　"Frances and Bernard"　is a tribute to the power of friendship and the people who help us discover who we are.

Raised in evangelical churches that preach apocalypse now, Carlene Bauer grows up happy to oblige the God who presides over her New Jersey girlhood. But in high school and in college, her intellectual and spiritual horizons widen, though still she finds it hard to let go of her ingrained ideals and to rebel as she knows she should. She loves rock 'n' roll but politely declines offers of sex and drugs, and hovers between a hunger for the world and a suspicion of it. In her twenties, however, determined to make up for lost time, Bauer undertakes a belated and often comic coming-of-age in New York City--ultimately falling in love and losing her religion, and left wondering just what it means to be good.

Sharply written, hilarious, and touching, "Not That Kind of Girl" is the story of one young woman's efforts to define worldliness, ambition, and love on her own terms.

'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep A fabulous power ballad to female friendship, Girls They Write Songs About is a thrumming, searching novel about the bonds that shape us more than any love affair Rose and Charlotte arrive in 1990s New York, fresh out of university and fizzing with ambition. When they end up working at the same music magazine, Charlotte - earnest, bookish - is wary of brash, outspoken Rose. But hesitancy soon gives way to a unique friendship that will change both girls forever. Determined to take advantage of every day in this exasperating, jubilant city, their lives become entirely entwined. Together they find love and lose it, hit their strides and stumble, see each other through marriages, motherhood, divorces, career glories and catastrophes. But what happens when your lives start to fall out of sync? What does it mean to give up on the dreams that held a friendship together? As smart and comic as it is gloriously exuberant, Girls They Write Songs About takes a timeless story and turns it into a pulsing, wrecking, clear-eyed tale of two friends reckoning with the lives they've chosen, and the countless ways all the women they've known have made them who they are.