The last thing that sixtysomething-year-old Barbara expects at her casual dinner party is to be dumped by her best friend. Yet that’s exactly what happens in the first few pages of Daniel M. Lavery’s new book, Meeting New People.
“We don’t talk about friendship breakups,” explains Lavery. ”I heard that so often that it started to feel like its own form of speech, like people talked about how it is not talked about. I find that really interesting.”
Lavery tackles the not-talked-about topic head-on over the course of the book, starting right as Barbara’s best friend, Susan, comes over for a weeknight dinner with a written list of all the things that Barbara has done wrong.
Barbara is taken aback—and ticked off that Susan didn’t wait until after dinner to dump her—but she isn’t exactly surprised. After all, Barbara is not only twice-divorced, but has experienced friend breakups before. She’s had nine best friends over the years and plans to find someone to replace Susan. However, in the wake of this latest dissolution, Barbara recognizes that she needs to find out what went wrong in the past before she can find a replacement, once she recovers from the humiliation of being dumped—again.
Almost everyone has been dumped by a romantic partner—at some point or another—so almost everyone can relate to and commiserate with the end of those relationships. However, there’s something deeply embarrassing and isolating about being dumped by a friend. That’s what intrigued Lavery about the subject.
“It’s different than talking about a romantic breakup,” Lavery says. “If your friend dumps you, who do you go and talk to about it? How do you decide who was more at fault or whether fault is to be apportioned out? There’s often this real sense of protective defensiveness afterwards, too. I think of it as something that has a lot of repercussions on somebody’s entire emotional life.”
Lavery adds a layer of complexity to the issue by making Barbara funny and sharp-witted, but also prickly and deeply opinionated in a way that is entertaining, but verges on mean (especially when it comes to “dessert people”). You can almost understand why Susan shows up to dinner with a list of small things that have built up into a Big Thing. You can tell the problem in Barbara’s relationships is at least partially her. That’s exactly what Lavery wanted.
“This book was pitched to my agent and editor as my Heartburn pastiche,” Lavery says, referring to the Nora Ephron book-turned-film. “I love how angry and cruel and often vindictive Rachel is in Heartburn. I think it’s beautiful. She has the real moral high ground in that she’s been cheated on while she’s pregnant. She has the sort of moral justification for her anger that I think works really well for the book. But I knew I didn’t want to have that in mind. I wanted Barbara not to have a leg to stand on. And I wanted her to really feel profoundly isolated.”
The one way Barbara connects to people is through her food. She works at a store that sounds similar to Zupan’s, where she oversees the prepared food and the younguns at the deli. Neither she nor Lavery scrimp on the descriptions. “I’m a big food nerd. I like food. I like thinking about food. I spend nowhere near as much time as Barbara in the preparation or the eating of food,” explains Lavery. “I had to do more research for that than I would have anticipated because I wanted it to feel like this was part of how she makes her living as well as part of what makes her, you know, uniquely her.”
And for his part, Lavery doesn’t mind if all the food descriptions whet your appetite. “Obviously, if you come away from this book hungry, that’s always fun,” he says, laughing.
Over the course of the novel, Lavery’s third, Barbara shares different theories about which friendships work and why, including one interesting defense of friendships begun over the shared dislike of a third person, an idea that intrigued Lavery. “This is not like a campaign for telling everyone to go out and adopt new friends based on hating somebody else, but it can be a hell of a lot of fun,” says Lavery. “And I’m interested in that. I’m interested in the fun that unkindness can produce, as well as the fun that kindness can produce.”
While the book follows Barbara’s pursuit to find a new friend, it’s not a rehashing of the trope about looking for someone, but finding yourself along the way. “I wanted something in between Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women and A Christmas Carol where ‘Scrooge was as good as his word and became as good a master as the old town had ever seen’,” Lavery says. At the end of the book, Barbara is no post-redemption Scrooge, but something in between. “She wants to connect better with other human beings and become kinder in a way that is real and sincere and true, and yet not simply be likable, which I think she would hate,” Lavery explains.
While Lavery has experienced the unique pain of being dumped by a friend, he made sure that Barbara’s story is nothing like his own. “This could not come within a mile of like my own personal experience,” he says. “I wanted to get at certain truths about ruptures and intimacies and anger,” but says his could never have been auto-fiction. “If it was, I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere.”
Daniel M. Lavery reads from Meeting New People at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, Tues June 2, 7:30 pm, FREE, all ages who appreciate fine literature