A Year in Reading: Rachel Fershleiser

December 7, 2012 | 4 books mentioned 2 2 min read

So far this year, I’ve read 56 books, an unpublished manuscript, and 100 pages of Moby-Dick. I loved many of them, although not Moby-Dick (Sorry Herman Melville/Amanda Bullock.). But the reading experience I feel most evangelical about was one of those brief passionate affairs, red hot and over too soon.

coverI bought Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close from the front table at Word Brooklyn on the Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend and read it the next day, in one sitting, on a flowered blanket in Madison Square Park. It’s honest, sharp, enjoyable and unnerving. It’s witty but it isn’t cute. It creeps into your stomach and makes you dizzy — at least it does if you’re a 32-year-old woman trying to figure out life and relationships and where the last 10 years went and where the next 50 are going.

While this book certainly covers floral bridesmaid dresses and date dissection over cocktails, it has a darker and more resonant undercurrent. It gives voice to my quiet suspicions that the decade following college graduation is one of loss after loss; a time of people you once loved immensely peeling away into parenthood or panic attacks or bad marriages or sudden religiosity or the suburbs. It captures those strange mixed feelings of trying to be happy for friends when they choose things you think you know will never make them happy; the helpless panic as the strongest and most ambitious feminists give up and give in or maybe just grow up and learn to compromise and who are you to judge anyway? It displays real wisdom about the ways that, over time, paths dead end and options disappear and life can feel like a narrowing of possibilities when you always thought it would be an ever-broadening horizon. Also, it’s funny.

When I finished, I did two things.

1) I wrote a blog post calling it “a perfect book” and recommending it thusly: “If you have ever been in your 20s or 30s, ever lived in New York or Chicago or D.C., ever been in a relationship that was good or bad or probably both, ever been politically engaged or diamond-ring engaged or had a baby or not wanted a baby or been an assistant or found out your ex married someone you both went to college with, oh my God you guys.”

covercover2) I gave it to my best friend from college. She related to it so intensely she refused her mother-in-law’s request to borrow it because it would be too much like allowing her to spy on her life.

In general, my favorite literary genre this year was what I like to call “women-processing-their-shit books,” in which I also recommend Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell, The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle, and anything by Nora Ephron or Cheryl Strayed.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

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heads publisher outreach at Tumblr. Previously she was the Community Manager at Bookish and the Director of Public Programs at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, where she now serves on the board of directors. She is also the co-creator of Six-Word Memoirs and co-editor of the New York Times Bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning, three other books, and a zine about soup.