In a nutshell: this book is funny but the premise does wear thin after a while.
Fleshed out: there’s some really keen insights on a very specific subset of the world–women in NYC who are “friends” but also not and don’t really have “real careers” through a combination of chutzpah and family wealth and are always into “wellness” and being “woke” but also have cleaners whose nationality and/or name they could not produce if needed.
I am lucky to say that I do not know women like this! But my friends and I, perhaps not over email, do snobbily think ourselves better than these sorts of women. What a complicated web to unpack.
In any case, I think this book could have maybe benefitted from being about fewer friends? It took a while to get all the characters mentally sorted out, and I’m not sure I ever really did (there’s the Ted Talk-y one, and the one getting engaged, and the one who lives in Brooklyn, and the one who’s always paying for things, and the one who sets healthy boundaries! and some others, that’s not yet eight). But the broad strokes are pretty funny, even if the premise requires some stretching of credibility (who are these people on email this much, even I don’t email this much and it’s about 50% of my job).
At the end of the day, I guess I’m still rooting for this group of weird and sort of toxic women to make it work, maybe in smaller groups that clump together out of shared (or, more shared) interests. Adult friendships are hard, man, and far be it from me to criticize them in any form they come.