“It was thrilling—she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt so invincible. She was twenty-four and living in New York City, and in her mind there had never been such a perfect combination. She wasn’t going to let some prick like Wally Roebling ruin all her fun. She could be anyone, have anything. All that mattered was how much she wanted it.”

Sasha’s internal monologue reveals her desire to explore life on her own terms. While she is sharing life in New York with her friends, she longs to follow her own path and pursue her personal desires—impulses which will shape her decisions and behaviors over the course of the novel, at times drawing her away from or closer to her friends.

“While he didn’t blame himself for his parents’ deaths […] he did occasionally feel as though their departure had rendered his own life a burden to other people. Aunt Patty hadn’t wanted children […] but when Adam was four, she’d found herself cleaning out her home office to make room for a twin bed.”

Adam’s tendency to people-please reiterates The Tension Between Chosen Family and Individual Identity. At this juncture in the novel, Adam is still finding his place within the larger friend group. To do so, he relies on his age-old habit of negotiating his identity to appease others. This passage reveals that Adam’s habits are inspired by his fraught childhood, and foreshadows how these habits will dictate his friendships.

“Yes, more was probably the answer—had, in Richie’s case, always been the answer. A little more of this to lift you up, a little more of that to bring you down, a little more of whatever else there was to forget that you were ever too up or too down in the first place. Obliterating yourself was a science that required a delicate balance. It always shocked him that, given his prodigious experience, he could never seem to get it right.”

The elliptical structure of this passage enacts Richie’s unsettled state of mind. Richie is thinking about his drinking and drug-use habits, which establishes his fraught relationship with these substances. The use of commas and em dashes, self-correction, and the second person captures Richie’s simultaneous self-involvement—heightened by his dependency—and his feelings of estrangement from himself. These are key personal conflicts throughout Richie’s storyline and come to define his relationships with the larger friend group.

“She felt like she could tell Marco all of this—like she could say to him, ‘Do you ever feel like you’re really bad at life?’ and he would listen without making fun of her, and would take what she said seriously. […] She pictured herself telling him other things. She imagined a door opening between them, one through which they could allow these secret parts of themselves to pass.”

The first night Mia and Marco meet, Mia muses on the marked intimacy and trust she feels with Marco. Her private thoughts foreshadow how her and Marco’s relationship will rapidly develop, and the indelible bond they will share even years after they date and break up.

“In the thirteen years they had known each other, Mia had never seen Sasha act so irrationally—after talking to her, Mia was often left with an overwhelming urge to throw Sasha from a very tall building, or set herself on fire.”

Mia’s uncomfortable experience at Courtney’s wedding develops the theme of the tension between chosen family and individual identity. Although Mia has known her friends for many years, she feels disconnected from them when they reunite at the wedding. This is particularly true of her relationship with Sasha, which has become foreign territory. Instead of validating or challenging her, this relationship upsets and destabilizes Mia because she has chosen a different life path from her closest friend.

“But in this case, Adam was pretty sure of his reasoning. He wasn’t trying to be morally superior, or boring, or any of the other things Richie typically accused him of being. Instead, he was trying to be pragmatic. Last night at the rehearsal dinner, Richie had gotten a little too messed up and had made a scene. Adam could identify the exact moment when things started to turn—he had become adept at that.”

Much like Mia, Adam’s experience at Courtney’s wedding intensifies how he is evolving beyond his friends, particularly Richie. Adam deeply cares about Richie, but he does not always enjoy spending time together the way Richie does, specifically doing drugs. In this passage, Adam wants to connect with Richie (thus maintaining their historical connection), but he wants to trust “his reasoning” and follow his instincts, too.

“Sensing Emily glancing over at him, he smiled and reached for his fork. As he loaded it with spinach, he considered the possibility that the reason he was sweating was not because of the heat, or the humidity, or the fact that he had elected to wear a gray linen suit, but rather because Mia Hoffmann was sitting directly across from him.”

The image of Marco sweating over his salad in his linen suit conveys Marco’s physical and emotional discomfort, reflecting Romantic and Professional Rivalry Within Close Circles. Marco is trying to maintain appearances with his fiancée—glancing to the side to see Emily—but he is directly facing Mia. He is with Emily, but remains connected to and thus preoccupied with his ex.

“She didn’t feel old enough to be making this kind of decision—to be upending her life, and tying herself to one specific future. What would happen if it didn’t work out? She would be left alone in a new city where she knew no one, forced to begin all over again while everyone else carried on without her.”

This flashback to the era of Mia and Marco’s breakup provides insight into Mia and Marco’s relationship in the present. Although the two were in love, Mia’s internal monologue reveals that she doubted the sustainability of their dynamic and mistrusted her own judgment. The questions she asks herself in this passage convey both her interrogative, searching nature and her uncertainty surrounding fate and chance.

“Mia held her smile; Emily chewed on the corner of her thumb. She apologized again, and while she sounded sincere, Mia found herself wondering if it was all an act, every single second of it, and if Emily was practicing her bedside manner, pretending she was telling a patient that she’d found a tumor the size of a cantaloupe, and that she had six weeks to live.”

Mia’s interaction with Marco’s fiancée Emily at Courtney’s wedding conveys romantic and professional rivalry within close circles. Despite Mia’s envy of Emily, she primarily tries to extend grace to Emily and to accept her seeming “olive branch.” In this scene, however, she begins to doubt Emily’s intentions because she feels they are engaged in a competition for Marco’s affection—a dynamic that lasts for years because of Mia and Marco’s history.

“Because what other choice was there? Behind him was the bloody trail of his youth, while in front of him was…he didn’t know. The potential for something else, maybe. A lightness that he hadn’t thought was possible. All that separated them was a thin sliver of faith, held together by bad coffee, new friends, and silly aphorisms about days being taken one at a time.”

The use of figurative language and descriptive detail in this passage formally conveys how Richie has changed since getting sober. In previous sections, Richie’s internal monologues are more harried. Here, Richie is more willing to meditate on his past, present, and future. In the final lines, he is studying his surroundings and leaning into the goodness he might find in his friends and new life, even if fleeting.

“Up until a few years ago, she had been able to talk with her friends about anything. Now all anyone cared about was real estate and babies. The real estate she could understand—when someone she knew bought an apartment, the first thing she did was immediately search Zillow to try to discern how much they’d paid for it. The babies, on the other hand, were beginning to get to her.”

Mia’s experience of the Amagansett trip underscores the theme of the tension between chosen family and individual identity. Since Mia has not chosen to get married and have children like many of her friends, she feels increasingly disconnected from them and as if she has lost a competition with them. Her desires no longer align with those of many of her friends, and she finds it increasingly hard to relate to them.

“On the other hand, she was getting a little annoyed that he couldn’t get it together. By all accounts they lived very easy lives. They had decent health insurance through the gallery, and they had gotten a sub-three-percent rate on their mortgage. And the fact that Theo was choosing not to focus on all that but was wallowing in self-doubt struck Sasha as indulgent.”

Sasha’s frustration with her husband Theo Wingate’s job loss adds to the theme of romantic and professional rivalry within intimate circles. For years, people have admired Sasha because she appears to have the ideal life—married to the college heartthrob and successful businessman Theo Wingate. Now that Theo is without work, Sasha feels her life crumbling, and her once-fixed identity with it. Her harried state of mind in this passage conveys her fear of losing her clout.

“His immediate impulse was to physically harm Lev. He hated him, and he wanted to take him outside and smash his face against the curb. But he was also furious at Mia. How could she not see how terrible he was? And how could she allow herself to become so small around him?”

The violent imagery in this scene creates an intense mood, which mirrors Marco’s state of mind when thinking about Mia and Lev’s relationship. Marco is so against Lev because he still has feelings for Mia. He imagines himself hurting Mia’s new boyfriend to quell his own internal upset, reflecting a possessive streak toward her instead of allowing her to make her own decisions.

“She was glad that Lev had come, but also a little bit not. She hadn’t seen all of her friends in a while, and with Lev there she felt like she couldn’t entirely be herself around them. There was a part of her that was always trying to figure out how he was seeing everything.”

Mia’s private thoughts about bringing Lev to Richie’s Amagansett birthday party reflect time as a test of bonds between people. For years, Mia has understood herself according to her relationships with Marco, Richie, Adam, Nina, and Sasha. Now with Lev in the mix, she is unsure how she is supposed to conduct herself and worried that she is acting out of character because she can’t reconcile who she is with Lev with who she is with her friends.

“Unwittingly he had convinced himself that his life would fit into an easy narrative trajectory, and that he would be rewarded for doing something hard. But that wasn’t what had happened at all. It might have taken getting sober to realize what he wanted, except now that he had realized it, it was, of course, too late.”

Richie is standing outside alone, musing on his life and how his protracted sobriety journey has impacted his sense of self and his relationships with his friends. In turn, the passage invokes time as a test of bonds between people, as Richie is remarking on how time has drawn him and his friends along different paths.

“The first was that she was happy to be away from Lev, and to no longer share a bathroom with him. The second was that she was almost forty years old, and alone, and felt like an unlovable freak.”

Mia’s breakup with Lev impacts how she sees herself as an individual and in the context of her larger friend group. Mia knows that she and Lev weren’t right for each other, yet this truth contrasts with her desire to prove herself stable and happy to her friends. She deems herself an “unlovable freak” because the majority of her friends are in committed relationships. She can’t stop viewing herself in comparison to them, invoking romantic and professional rivalry within close circles.

“There was a twisty, sinking feeling in Mia’s stomach. What did she mean, she couldn’t make it work? The expression lodged itself somewhere in the back of Mia’s throat: all of a sudden she felt like one of Sasha’s chores, one that she didn’t have the time or wherewithal to complete.”

Mia’s disappointment with Sasha after Sasha backs out of their trip underscores how time and circumstances threaten to draw the friends apart. Mia is offended that Sasha is bailing on their Miami plans because Sasha’s behavior undervalues her experience. She genuinely wants to reconnect with Sasha but is beginning to doubt that Sasha feels the same way.

“Richie found himself wondering what, if anything, was the point. What was the point of loving people if all they were going to do was lie to you, and betray you, and keep secrets from you, and not invite you to Halloween parties in Montclair? What was the point of being good, if all good brought was grief?”

Richie’s internal monologue at the Halloween party has a questioning, defeatist mood. Richie has just learned of Sasha’s unkindness to Nina and her affair with Mitch Reynolds. These revelations have made him feel frustrated and hopeless. He resorts to drinking as a result.

“But none of that was the point. The point was that Sasha had picked Emily over Mia and hadn’t had the courage to tell her so. And this—the fact that she had lied—was a hundred times more painful than the truth itself. It proved to Mia something she had suspected for a while: that she and Sasha weren’t the sort of friends that they used to be, and that she was the idiot for wanting to hang on.

Mia and Sasha’s fight at the Halloween party leads them to a breaking point. Instead of simply explaining why she feels upset, Mia decides that Sasha is fundamentally not the person she thought she was. Similarly, Sasha could have told Mia the truth or apologized for breaking their plans, but she instead puts Emily before Mia. This moment creates a rupture between the characters, showing how time and circumstances are threatening to estrange them.

“He would blame himself for not being able to stop something he saw coming from its beginning, for not being able to defuse a ticking bomb. More than anything, he would wonder how they had gotten here. He would wonder how five people could have loved each other so completely, only then to decide they were repulsed by the monsters they had become.”

The use of the future tense in this passage underscores the significance of the friends’ fight at the Montclair birthday party. The third-person narrator has insight into the characters’ future that they do not yet have and is thus able to relay how Adam, in particular, will ruminate upon this altercation for years to come. The passage in turn underscores time as a test of bonds between people.

“She thought of other things—memories, opinions, questions. Bits of gossip she had picked up between then and now. All of it had seemed dumb and trivial, like the least urgent thing in the world—their lives had become so sprawling, so unwieldy, she had always figured there would be more time. But now that he was gone, it all took on an unbearable significance: everything that she experienced from now on would be something that she would not be able to talk to Adam about.”

Adam’s death compels Mia into a contemplative state of mind. Although the friends have known each other for a long time, Mia again realizes how little time they seem to have had together. Adam’s death ruptures her sense of reality and challenges the stability of the friend group. In turn, she realizes that she and her friends need to stop taking advantage of each other and fight to preserve their bond.

“He loved her—he had always loved her, even when it felt like he had never hated someone so much. It turned out Emily was right about that. Whether Mia loved him too was a different question; the same went for what would happen next.”

Marco’s internal monologue outside the funeral venue underscores the indelible nature of his and Mia’s bond. While Marco just recently argued with Emily over his sustained feelings for Mia, seeing his ex again reawakens his love for her. Marco is allowing himself to acknowledge this complicated truth and to accept the unknown of the future.

“No matter what he did he was going to end up here, always a little out of breath from running away from himself. But then he remembered. He remembered the last time he was with Adam, and the way their knees brushed against each other as they talked. He remembered how Adam looked outside, and how his voice got quiet when he said he loved the winter.”

Adam’s death challenges Richie to maintain his emotional stability for the sake of his late lover’s memory. The rapid tonal shift that happens between the first and second sentences of this passage parallels Richie’s internal conflict. On the one hand, he feels as if he will never be the person he wants to be. On the other hand, recalling his connection with Adam helps him remember what it means to be good, kind, and loved. Adam’s memory recenters Richie and helps him recommit to his sobriety.