Description
Carlene Bauer’s Girls They Write Songs About is a thrumming, searching novel about the friendships that shape women more than any love affair.We moved to New York to want, undisturbed and unchecked. And what did we want?New York, 1997. Charlotte, fresh out of grad school and confidently ambitious, interviews for a coveted staff writer job at an indie music magazine. The role goes to the bold, effervescent Rose, who has a slew of bylines already under her belt. Charlotte settles for the decidedly less glamorous job of Rose’s editor. Despite this strained start, they recognize in each other an insatiable and—until then—unmatched want for more. Before long, it’s clear they have found their life’s partners—in crime, in drive, in striving to make each other better.
Over two decades, Charlotte and Rose confront the world, armed with their ambition and desire—the limits of which will be tested. In turns, they find love, then lose it; they hit their stride, then flounder; they make choices, then regret them. Their relationship, its ebb and flow, is the cadence that carries them through it all. That is, until it meets its end, and Charlotte must learn to sing on her own.
With depth and candor,
Girls They Write Songs About excavates the complex terrain of love and friendship: how they shape us, empower us, hinder us, and how we know when to let them go. By turns wrecking and restorative, it asks: at the end of the day, how do we count out the lives we lived, and the lives we didn’t?
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