Eighteenth Book Wrap Up & New Books (by Jessica R)

MWF Seeking BFF

How important is it to have a local BFF? Should already having a handful of great BFFs in other cities be enough? Sometimes, it isn’t enough, and it wasn’t for Rachel Bertsche. Rachel moved to Chicago to be with her then-boyfriend, now-husband. She left behind her best friends in New York, without thinking twice. However, 2 years into living in Chicago, their absence, as well as the absence of comparable friendships, started to take a toll. There is really only so much a husband can do in the BFF department. The solution: a year-long search for a new BFF in Chicago. Rachel went on 52 girl-dates (with girls from book clubs to cooking class to “Rent-a-Friends” to Friends-of-Friends) in order to look for “someone [she] could call and say, ‘What are you doing today?’ or ‘Let’s meet for brunch in an hour.’” What she found was a “bouquet of friends,” as well as a new and improved Rachel.

                The club was lucky enough to be able to Facetime with Rachel Bertsche for the first half of the meeting. She answered questions about finding friends, asking girls out, taking friendships to “the next level,” and then some:

• Karen asked about the right way to ask out her bartender. Rachel suggested using “inside cues.” An example would be using the mentioning of a place you both like and saying, “Let’s go sometime! When’s your next day off?”
• Jessica E. asked about how to deal with the “awkward dates” and not get discouraged. Rachel very wisely said, “You need to keep going through the awkward ones until you find the one or two good ones.”
• Stephanie asked about taking friendships to the next level, and reaching the point of asking to crash on their couch after a fight with a boyfriend. Rachel advised to progressively move up in the type of conversation first, like go from e-mailing to texting, then to calling, etc. As for the “couch-crashing” point, there isn’t really ever a “right point” in a friendship. That just happens when you actually make that call. The act of making that phone call is what takes the friendship to that “place.”
• In response to Jerlin’s question about how to deal with friend break-ups, Rachel said “there are a lot of potential friends, but sometimes you just don’t mesh.”

All of the girls felt connected to this book because everyone’s been there. All of the girls are, or were at some point, transplants, and have gone on similar friend-quests. Elvira noted that there is total truth in what Rachel said about saying yes to invitations: “The more you say yes, the more invites you get.” Jessica R. told her story about coming to SF to be with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, and how she found an “SF BFF” by joining a ceramics class. There are a lot of different life-stages that cause friendlessness (Jennifer), and everyone could use a new friend or two. It’s about getting out there and being ready for new opportunities.

The night ended with a circle of stories about Girl Break-ups, friendships changing because of marriage or relationships, and about having friends of the opposite sex. One of the girls’ husbands asked why the meeting ran so late, she answered “we just sat around chatting like great friends.”

The next book we’ll be reading will be Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides for our April 4^th meeting. After which we will be reading the classic Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

Oprah’s Book Club has this to say about Middlesex:

“A dazzling triumph from the best-selling author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex is the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of Calliope Stephanides.

‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’ So begins Jeffrey Eugenides ‘s second novel, Middlesex, the story of Calliope Stephanides, who discovers at the age of 14 that she is really a he. Cal traces the story of his transformation and the genetic condition that caused it back to his paternal grandparents, who happen also to be brother and sister, and the Greek village of Bithynios in Asia Minor.

In 1922, Desdemona Stephanides and her brother, Lefty, whose parents were killed in the recent war with the Turks, are living alone in their nearly abandoned village. Pulled together by isolation, sympathy, and, perhaps, fate, Lefty and Desdemona become husband and wife, and a recessive genetic condition begins its journey toward eventual expression in their grandchild Calliope.

Middlesex is a story about what it means to occupy the complex and unnamed middle ground between male and female, Greek and American, past and present. For Cal, caught between these identities, the journey to adulthood is particularly fraught. Jeffrey Eugenides’s epic portrayal of Cal’s struggle is classical in its structure and scope and contemporary in its content—a tender and honest examination of a battle that is increasingly relevant to us all.”