I'm So Happy for You (29 page)

Wendy did her best to keep Phyllis in her life, as well. Although the two never regained the closeness they once shared, Wendy
made a point of sending her ex-mother-in-law regular email updates on Lila’s progress.

Adam took care of Lila two afternoons and one overnight per week. He also got a job copyediting at a new online business magazine.

Tired of “preaching to the converted” and newly inspired to help others, Wendy left her job at
Barricade
and went back to grad school to become a social worker. To help pay the bills, she worked part-time in a Legal Aid office.
There, she met and began dating a workaholic lawyer named Charlie, who was also divorced with a child. The two—and sometimes
four—had a good time together. But Wendy’s heart was never in it.

After a couple of years apart, she realized she missed Adam. Or maybe it was that she loved the sight of him and Lila together—the
way he carted her around on his shoulders and snuggled her to sleep and made silly faces that made her laugh. It dawned on
Wendy that she longed to reunite their family. The two started dating again—or, really, for the first time. They went out
to dinner and the movies. They met for lunch in the park with Lila. Wherever possible, they avoided mention of Daphne. On
Wendy’s thirty-eighth birthday, Adam surprised her with an antique garnet ring. Garnet was a semi-precious—not a precious—stone,
Wendy couldn’t help but note. But she appreciated the gesture.

As for Wendy and Daphne, each December, they traded holiday cards featuring photographs of their respective children. Every
so often, one or the other emailed to suggest they get together for a playdate. “I’m dying to see you,” Daphne would write.

“I know, it’s been too long,” Wendy would write back.

But when it came time to pin down a date, both would feign prior commitments.

One Saturday, several years after the night of Alex’s birth, they ran into each other at the Children’s Museum in Soho. They
swapped small talk, and Alexander—now a handsome, hyperactive preschooler—immediately made off with Lila’s security blanket,
sending Lila into hysterics. To Wendy’s shock, Daphne appeared to have gained a considerable amount of weight. Was it possible?
Yes, Wendy thought: she was definitely heavier around the hips and thighs.

As Wendy pushed her stroller up Greene Street, she looked down at Lila and smiled. It wasn’t just that Daphne had gotten fat.
Wendy could never have imagined how much pleasure and confidence she’d reap from motherhood. She wondered if Daphne had reaped
those things, too. It occurred to Wendy that Daphne’s birthday was coming up the following week. Maybe she’d send her a card.
She might even invite her out to lunch.…

Special thanks to Maria Massie and Judy Clain, and also to Sally Singer, Cressida Leyshon, Jessica Palmieri, and Lucy D. Rosenfeld.

BACK BAY • READERS’ PICK

R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE

I’m So Happy for You

a novel

Lucinda Rosenfeld

Lucinda Rosenfeld discusses how she came
to write
I’m So Happy for You

In 2001, I wrote a humorous essay for the
New York Times Magazine
called “How to Dump a Friend.” I had a lot of fun with the assignment. Plus, my first novel,
What She Saw…
—an exhaustive account of all the boys and men in one young woman’s life—had recently been published. It occurred to me that
friendship in general, and more specifically female friendship and the competitive feelings it often engenders, was a fascinating,
complex, and underexplored topic. This was true in literature but also in film and TV. I was as big a fan of the HBO series
Sex and the City
as anyone in my peer group. Yet the way in which the four leads interacted never rang entirely true to me. Talk of men and
relationships dominated their conversation, whereas in my own friendship circle—I couldn’t help noticing—we spoke as much
about one another as we did about our boyfriends or (now mostly) husbands. Some of that talk was catty; some was concerned.

It took me several more years to figure out how to build a novel around the topic of friendship. The “problem” with constructing
a narrative around friends (versus, say, lovers) is that, without sex and the promise of marriage, reproduction, etc., the
stakes aren’t intrinsically high. In romance, breaking up is understood to be a shattering event that throws the future into
question. In friendship, it’s a small setback, a minor irritation. If you don’t like hanging out with someone, don’t hang
out with him/her anymore is the accepted wisdom. And yet, when I looked at my own life, I saw that friendship had been the
source of both tremendous joy and profound hurt as friends had abandoned me, or I them.

In 2004, I got another assignment—this one from
New York
magazine—to write an essay about friend poaching. That became “Our Mutual Friend: How to Steal Friends and Influence People.”
I began to think about how friends, even best friends, rarely exist in a vacuum but are instead part of a larger clique whose
dynamics are themselves always in flux. At one point I aspired to write a novel about a group of women à la Mary McCarthy’s
The Group,
but it soon became apparent to me that, if friendship was my main topic, I would do better with two main characters. Eventually,
I landed on Wendy and Daphne. Neither one is me, but I see parts of myself in both of them. I’m the insecure obsessive in
Wendy, but I’m also the self-centered drama queen in Daphne. At various moments in my life, I’ve also been the steady “boring”
one (Wendy), and the unstable, flaky one (Daphne). I’ve even been the glib, carefree Daphne who seemingly appears later in
the novel. One of my goals in writing
I’m So Happy for You
was to make both main characters simultaneously problematic and sympathetic. If you come away loathing one or both of them,
I haven’t done my job.

  1. Wendy’s desperation to have a baby has turned her and Adam’s sex life into a “military operation.” Do you think Wendy’s
militant determination is justified, or is she putting an unnecessary amount of stress on her marriage?

  2. In the opening chapter, after Daphne stops answering her phone, is Wendy right to show up uninvited at Daphne’s apartment?
Would you do the same thing if a friend of yours were in a situation like Daphne’s?

  3. Wendy is not exactly ecstatic when things start to go well in Daphne’s life. How do Daphne’s sudden successes reflect on
Wendy’s self-image? If Wendy were happier, would she be happier for Daphne?

  4. Do you think that the irony implied by the book’s title can be applied to all friendships?

  5. Regarding Wendy’s work for
Barricade,
do you find her actions and obsessions to be in keeping or in conflict with the political bent of her job?

  6. Daphne, in her friendship with Wendy, has always been the “beautiful one.” How does physical appearance affect the dynamic
between them? Between friends in general?

  7. In friendship as in love, one person may “fake it” for the sake of the other. When is it worth it to stretch or omit the
truth in regard to a friend? In what ways do Daphne and Wendy cross that line?

  8. The two men Daphne goes after don’t seem like obvious choices. Why do you think she’s drawn to Mitch Kroker and Jonathan
Sonnenberg?

  9. At first glance, Adam and Daphne seem like unlikely co-conspirators. What’s your take on their alliance?

10. Wendy has a fraught relationship with her mother, Judy. What do you think of the role her mother plays in Wendy’s life?

11. Did you relate more easily to Wendy or to Daphne? (Or both? Neither?) How so?

12. How does money (having it, wanting it, needing it) shape the novel? Do you think Wendy is justified in wanting Adam to
go back to work? Would money solve their problems?

13. Wendy reads one of Shakespeare’s sonnets at Daphne’s wedding. In light of the story, what do you think of the lines “Love
is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds”?

14. How do friendship “breakups” differ from romantic ones?

15. Name some of the essential differences between friendships among women and friendships among men.

16. Wendy has a fierce yet tacit antagonism with Paige Ryan. When Paige tells Wendy that Daphne’s baby belongs to Adam, should
Wendy believe her without first talking to Adam? Would you have believed Paige?

17. In the hospital, when Daphne admits to having cheated on Jonathan, does she seem genuinely sorry about the choices she’s
made? Should she be?

18. At the end of the novel, (mostly) everyone winds up in a place far different from where she or he started. Do you think
Wendy and Daphne will be happy? Will they be happy—at long last—for each other?

19. What other books about friendship do you find particularly true to life? Did
I’m So Happy for You
remind you of any of them?

Aristotle (384–322 BC),
Nicomachean Ethics

In this classical text, Aristotle takes the position that true friendship, unlike friendship based on utility or pleasure,
is defined by a mutual desire for goodness. Aristotle writes:
Only the friendship of those who are good, and similar in their goodness, is perfect. For these people each alike wish good
for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for the friends’
sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.
Whether there are any friendships that
actually
live up to this description is open for debate!

Jane Austen,
Emma
(1815)

Austen’s books generally revolve around sisters. But in this beloved novel, charming “socialite” Emma Woodhouse gets overinvolved
in the romantic life of her penniless friend Harriet Smith—to both comic and disastrous effect.

Honoré de Balzac,
Cousin Pons
(1848)

Part two in the series known as Poor Relations, this brilliant, biting novel concerns a pitiful old theater conductor whose
relatives and neighbors slowly destroy his life. The only one who remains true to poor Pons is his best friend and roommate,
a wistful German pianist named Schmucke. And yet even Pons and Schmucke have their tensions. A warning: the ending is so dark
it’s almost painful to read.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Gambler
(1867)

This autobiographically inspired novel ostensibly concerns a young tutor whose employment by a once-rich general and love
of an elusive woman lead him to gamble, but it also contains some choice passages on friendship. One example:
Yes, most men love to see their best friend in abasement; for generally it is on such abasement that friendship is founded.
All thinking persons know that ancient truth.

Evelyn Waugh,
Brideshead Revisited
(1945)

The English class system is on full display in this searing, satiric portrait of two university friends, one rich and dissolute,
the other poor and aspiring. The Masterpiece Theater version with Jeremy Irons as Charles and Anthony Andrews as the opium-addled
Sebastian (1981) is—dare I say?—almost better than the book.

Mary McCarthy,
The Group
(1963)

This sprawling novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s as they grapple with marriage, Marxism, and
the specter of their vanishing careers. This reader wished that McCarthy had devoted more time to chronicling the women’s
interactions with one another, but a highly memorable scene involving a diaphragm fitting nearly compensates for the lack.

Margaret Atwood,
Cat’s Eye
(1988)

The cruelty of young girls is the subject of this disturbing psychological novel in which the narrator, now a middle-aged
artist, reflects back on her unconventional childhood and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her sadistic “best friend”
(for whom the narrator nonetheless felt deep longing).

Martin Amis,
The Information
(1996)

A confession: I’ve never gotten all the way through a Martin Amis novel—including this one—but some people (my sister, for
one) love this tale of two old Oxford friends-turned-writers, one of whom has “hit it big,” the other of whom is madly envious
and bent on revenge.

Zoë Heller,
What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal
(2003)

The creepiness factor is high in British writer Zoë Heller’s pitch-perfect novel about a middle-aged high school history teacher
whose “friendship” with a flighty, glamorous young art teacher—who begins an affair with one of her teenage students—quickly
turns obsessive bordering on pathological.

Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan,
The Underminer: Or, the Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life
(2005)

This delicious little novel is essentially a monologue in the voice of the ultimate backstabber.

Jenny Offil and Elissa Schappell, editors,
The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away
(2006)

A smart if earnest collection for those who like their betrayal in essay form.

Joseph Epstein,
Friendship: An Exposé
(2006)

A meandering memoir in which the author —who claims to have seventy-five close pals—tries to figure out how we choose our
friends.