Brooklyn author’s debut novel explores complexity of female friendships
Brooklyn BookBeat
Brooklyn author Rumaan Alam’s debut novel “Rich and Pretty” (Ecco; On-sale June 7) chronicles a certain kind of female friendship: elusive, complex and enduring. Through his career in fashion and publishing and his life in New York, Alam’s mentors, colleagues and friends have always been women — and it’s this lifetime of camaraderie that bleeds into his humorous and thoughtful examination of female friendship and how it affects ambition, career and family.
While coming-of-age books are plentiful, not as many examine the in-between stage of the early-to-mid-30s, when adult expectations loom large but in real life often fall short. Alam masters the specific growing pains that arise in one’s early 30s, and the difficulty at trying to maneuver them.
His book traces the story of Sarah and Lauren, who, throughout 20 years of friendship, have been through private school and college, boyfriend after boyfriend, different apartments and different jobs. Lauren is single and works in publishing, lusting after her office’s temp and waiting for a promotion. Sarah is engaged, working a charity job and planning a wedding to her longtime boyfriend. Their lives run on different tracks, and they both envy and despise certain parts of the other’s. They talk around this distance when together in the balletic way of most female friends, adeptly stepping around the problematic parts, and trying to linger in the warm ones.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.