Girls They Write Songs About

Bol

A dazzling, decades-spanning tale of female friendship, love, and the pursuit of dreams in gritty 1990s New York City. New York, 1997. As the city's rough edges are polished into something safer and shinier, two aspiring writers meet at a music magazine. Rose—bold and self-assured—is a staff writer. Charlotte—cautious and literary—is an editor. Initially wary, they soon recognize in each other an unmatched ambition. They become inseparable, turning every day into an adventure and believing they will undoubtedly achieve extraordinary things. Together, Charlotte and Rose find and lose love, hit their strides and stumble, and make choices that resonate long past. They promise, "Don't ever leave me"—their favorite joke, but also their truest words. But then the steady rhythm of their sisterhood falls out of sync. They've seen each other through marriage, motherhood, divorce, career triumphs and defeats, and countless small but significant decisions. What will it mean if they must give up their shared dreams? Can they reconcile with the lives they've chosen and find peace with the ones they didn't? In Carlene Bauer's smart, comic, and gloriously exuberant Girls They Write Songs About, two women reckon with the loss of the defining friendship of their lives and the countless ways all the women they've known have shaped them. This pulsing, lucid saga is a timeless story of the most essential bonds.

Bol Partner

An unforgettable power ballad to female friendship, set on the thrumming streets of 1990s New York 'The instant feminist classic our generation has been waiting for' Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep What happens when growing up means growing apart? 1997. New York. Earnest, bookish Rose. Brash, extrovert Charlotte. When they moved to New York in the late nineties, coffee cost less than a dollar and you could still smoke in bars. You could stay up drinking all night, sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape. Everyone has their own New York, and for Rose and Charlotte it was a place to feed their ambition, a place to dance and party and fall in love, far from the suburbs they once called home. It was New York City, and it was everything they ever wanted. Their friendship was different too: intense and life-changing. The kind that only happens once. The kind that couldn't last forever. In Carlene Bauer's exuberant novel, Rose and Charlotte look back and reckon with the loss of a friendship that helped define them, shaping their lives more than any love affair. 'Excellent... Full of texture and feeling.' Vivian Gornick