Sometimes it is our friends that shape us as much as our families do. It is our friends that often hold our closest secrets, the secrets about us that we don’t even realize they are holding. The age old dilemma of deciding whether or not to share something that might hurt a friend with that friend and what the consequences of not sharing these secrets are is explored in Beth Gutcheon’s new book. Lovie and Dinah met in prep school and stayed close friends as the two embarked on different paths in Manhattan, Lovie an assistant to a couture designer, Dinah a gossip columnist and lifestyles writer. Both were also acquaintances of Avis, whose path crosses theirs again as adults in Manhattan. Lovie has never married and owns an exclusive women’s dress shop on the Upper East Side, dressing the rich and famous. Dinah has married well, though not happily, and has two young boys. Avis has married an older man with two daughters and has one of her own. Whether it is because she is a sympathetic listener or because Lovie often fades into the background, she hears and sees a lot of things that could hurt her friends if they knew and often makes the decision not to tell rather than hurt one of the women closes to her, but there are some secrets that if they are not revealed can have devastating consequences, leaving those who knew wondering what would have happened if they had told. At first it may seem that Lovie is a faded character, but it soon becomes clear that she is a person who has never really defined herself, content with having a relationship with a married man most of her life, selling clothes to society women rather than being one. The book moves forward at a good pace and there is sometimes a helplessness in the prose as it tells the story of three women from high school classmates in the 1960’s through the 1970’s, the excess of the eighties and nineties and the fall from grace the new millennium brought.
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