Best Friends Forever Part 25

3. Go to a social networking site such as Facebook and see if you can find old friends you've lost touch with. Are you surprised by how their lives turned out, or are they pretty much what you'd imagined?

A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER WEINER.

Q: Did writing Goodnight n.o.body prepare you for the facets of mystery in Best Friends Forever: the investigation, the crime, the Thelma and Louiselike road trip?

A: Writing Goodnight n.o.body definitely helped. So did talking to the detectives who were nice enough to walk me through investigatory procedure (and to okay the liberties I planned on taking). I think the best part of researching this book was going to see the Lower Merion Towns.h.i.+p jail, which not only has a video setup for long-distance arraignments (the suspect stands in front of one camera and the judge, at home, in front of another), but also features the federally mandated handicapped-accessible holding cell, which was absolutely too good not to use in the book.

Q: Some of the same negative forces in Addie's life-Val and Vijay specifically-were also positive forces. Is that what you wanted your readers to take away from her experiences?

A: I think you can learn from any experience and any person, even the ones that hurt you so badly that you don't think you'll be able to survive them at the time. So yes, insofar as I had a message (and really, I cringe at the idea of books that try too hard to "teach" you something, and are not textbooks), the message was that you can survive anything life throws at you-a parent's death, a friend's betrayal, a boyfriend who breaks your heart-and come out stronger on the other side.

Q: Before she dies, Addie's mother tells her, "There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards." It seems like this is a metaphor for the entire novel. What are you trying to get across about the nature of love, forgiveness, and faith?

A: When Addie's mother is talking to her about love, Addie (and the reader) might a.s.sume that she's talking about romance. I like to think that what she's really talking about is Valerie, who betrayed Addie, and was herself betrayed by Addie. I think if she'd had more time, Nancy might have told her daughter that there aren't too many people you meet who you'll know and love for as long as you're alive. You won't have your parents around for your whole life, or your children... but a good friend can be forever.

Q: There are some comedic references to religious faith, particularly with Val and Chip Mason, and Dan Swansea is literally bombarded by faith. Why did you include this religious component?

A: When I wrote this book, I was thinking about religion, and the way G.o.d (at least the G.o.d in the Old Testament) tests people. Addie is kind of my version of Job-the person who has everything taken away, who is tested, seemingly at random. I wanted to answer the question: what happens to a woman who's an outcast to start with, and who loses everything she loves-her brother, her best friend, her parents, her boyfriend? How does she find the strength to go on? I guess the answer-she finds her strength in friends.h.i.+p-suggests that maybe friends.h.i.+p is its own kind of faith, its own kind of religion.

Q: As the story progresses, Dan becomes more of a catalyst for reuniting Val and Addie than an actual problem. Is that the direction you'd intended for his character to take, or did he surprise you?

A: Oh, Dan! He gave me so much trouble! There was a version of the book where he did die in that parking lot. There was another version where he was kidnapped and tortured by a bunch of angry feminists masquerading as a book club (because n.o.body suspects the book club!). It took me a long time and about a half-dozen drafts before I figured out that he wasn't a main character as much of a catalyst-a means to an end instead of an end in himself. Which is comeuppance enough for a former BMOC, right?

Q: You've explored close female relations.h.i.+ps in all of your books. What made you want to delve into the land of female friends.h.i.+ps?

A: I was interested in the idea of friends.h.i.+p as a choice. I've written a lot about the relations.h.i.+ps you don't choose: mothers and daughters, mothers and daughter-in-laws, sisters, new mothers and babies. With this book, I wanted to write about a relations.h.i.+p that you can opt into and out of.

Plus, like many women, I've had the experience of the friend who got away-the person you thought would always be part of your life, and then isn't, because you had a falling-out over whatever (with "whatever," at least in my experience, usually being a boy). Or you got married and she didn't, or she had kids and you didn't, or whatever. I think that's an experience that many women have, and I was really interested in seeing how it would play out in a novel.

Q: In Best Friends Forever, similar to some of your previous t.i.tles, the darker plot twists-cancer, obesity, rape, neglect-are peppered with humor. Do you consciously balance those elements as you write?

A: Actually, not really-it's not as if I'm thinking, "Ooh, this part was really dark, better throw in a joke," or "Time for a serious scene to balance out the funny"! I think it's just the way I'm wired, that my stories unfold with both humor and pathos... and I think I'm wired that way because of my own life, where, with every awful thing that happened, my mother would always tell me, "You'll laugh about this someday!" or "It's all material!"

Q: At one point, Addie is stripped of all her personal relations.h.i.+ps. Do you think that's what she needed to engage in the world around her?

A: Again, I saw Addie as my Job-the woman who was going to lose everything in order to rebuild a better life. (Actually, maybe instead of Job, she's the Six Million Dollar Woman-"Gentlemen, we can rebuild her!") Q: We get our first glimpse of Addie's newly designed home through the eyes of Jordan. He describes it specifically on page 223 as a "place made for pleasure." What kind of research did you do regarding home design? Do Addie's design choices reflect your own?

A: I did the usual-looked through a lot of home magazines, thought a lot about the kind of choices Addie would make-and because she's an artist, she'd probably make better choices than I do. But I wanted there to be a clear contrast between her home and Jordan's-specifically, I wanted him to live in a place that was totally alienating, where he couldn't open the cabinets or unlock the oven, and for Addie's place to feel very inviting and open.

Q: The end of the novel leaves a lot of room for a sequel. Are you thinking of continuing Addie and Valerie's story?

A: I'll have to see if they keep talking to me!.

What if the one you love is the one who got away?.

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to a doctor and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again.

Rachel grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation.

Over the next three decades, their paths cross in magical and ordinary ways. They make grand plans and dream big dreams as they grow together and apart in starts and stops. Through it all, Andy and Rachel never stop thinking about that night in the hospital waiting room all of those years ago, a chance encounter that changed the course of both of their lives.

In this captivating, often witty tale about the bonds between women and men, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you'll never forget.

Read on for a sneak peek at Jennifer Weiner's newest novel, Who Do You Love.

Available August 2015 from Atria Books.

Prologue.

Rachel.

2014.

"Rachel?"

I don't answer. If you build it, they will come. If you ignore them, they will go away.

Knock knock knock, and then my name again. "Rachel, are you in there?"

I twist myself more deeply into the sheets. The sheets are fancy, linen, part of the wedding haul, and they've only gotten smoother with every trip through the was.h.i.+ng machine. I pull the pillow over my head, noting that the case has acquired a not-so-fresh smell. This is possibly related to my not having showered or washed my face or hair for the last three days. I have left the bed only to use the toilet and scoop a handful of water from the bathroom sink into my mouth. On the table next to my bed there's a sleeve of Thin Mint cookies that I retrieved from the freezer, and a bag of Milanos for when I finish the Thin Mints. I don't want to cook. I don't want to move. It's spring, and sunny and mild, but I've pulled my windows shut, drawing the shades so I can't see the mom brigade ostentatiously wheeling their oversized strollers down the street, and forty-year-old guys with expensive suede sneakers and beards as carefully tended as bonsais tweeting while they walk, or the tourists snapping pictures of the snout-to-tail restaurants where everything's organic and locally sourced. The bedroom is dark; the doors are locked; my daughters are elsewhere. Lying on these soft sheets that smell of our commingled scent, hair and skin and the s.e.x we had two weeks ago, it's almost like not being alive at all.

Knock knock knock . . . and then-f.u.c.k me-the sound of a key. I shut my eyes, cringing, thinking that my mother or, worse yet, my Nana will come storming through the door, full of energy and advice and plans to get me out of bed.

Instead, someone comes and sits on the side of the bed, and touches my shoulder, which must be nothing but a lump underneath the duvet.

"Rachel," says Brenda, the most troubled and troublesome of my clients. Oh, G.o.d. I'd given her youngest son, Dante, a key the year before, so he could water the plants and take in the mail over spring break, a job for which I'd promised to pay him the princely sum of ten bucks. He'd asked me shyly if I could take him to the comic book store to spend it, and we'd walked there together with his hand in mine.

"Sorry I missed you," I mutter. My voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a clogged drain. I clear my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

"Don't worry," says Brenda. She squeezes my shoulder and gets off the bed, and then I hear her, moving around the room. Up go the shades. She opens the window, and a breeze ruffles my hair and raises goose b.u.mps on my bare arms. I work one eye open. She's got a white plastic laundry basket in her arms, which she's quickly filling with the discarded clothing on the floor. In the corner are a broom and a mop, and a bucket filled with cleaning supplies: Windex and Endust, Murphy's Oil Soap, one of those foam Magic Erasers, which might be useful for the stain on the wall from when I threw the vase full of tulips and stem-sc.u.mmed water.

I close my eyes, and open them again to the sharp-sweet smell of Pine-Sol. Brenda fills the bucket to the top with hot, soapy water. I watch like I'm paralyzed as she first sweeps and then dips her mop, squeezes it, and starts to clean my floors.

"Why?" I croak. "You don't have to . . ."

"It isn't for you, it's for me," says Brenda. Her head's down, her brown hair is drawn back in a ponytail, and it turns out she does own a s.h.i.+rt that's not low-cut, pants that aren't skintight, and shoes that do not feature stripper heels or, G.o.d help me, a goldfish frozen in five inches of pointed Lucite.

Brenda mops. Brenda dusts. She works the foam eraser until my walls are as smooth and unmarked as they were the day we moved in. Through the open window come the sounds of my neighborhood. "The website said Power Vinyasa, but I barely broke a sweat," I hear, and "Are you getting any signal?" and "Sebastian! Bad dog!"

I smell hot grease from the artisa.n.a.l doughnut shop that just opened down the block. The scent of gra.s.s and mud puddles. A whiff of dog s.h.i.+t, possibly from bad Sebastian. I hear a baby wail, and a mother murmur, and a pack of noisy guys, probably on their way to, or from, the parkour/CrossFit gym. My neighborhood, I decide, is an embarra.s.sment. I live on the Street of Cliches, the Avenue of the Expected. Worse, I'm a cliche myself: almost forty, the baby weight that I could never shed ringing my middle like a deflated inner tube, gray roots and wrinkles and b.r.e.a.s.t.s that only look good when they're stringently underwired. They could put my picture on Wikipedia: Abandoned Wife, Brooklyn.

Brenda's hands are gentle as she eases me up and off the bed and over to the chair in the corner-a flea-market find, upholstered in pink toile, the chair where I sat when I nursed my girls, when I read my books, when I wrote my reports. As I watch, she deftly strips the sheets off the bed, shakes the pillows free of their creased cases, and gives each one a brisk whack over her knee before settling it back on the bed. Dust fills the room, motes dancing in the beams of light that stream in through the dirt-filmed windows I'd been planning to have cleaned.

I huddle in my nightgown, shoulders hunched, knees pulled up to my chest. "Why are you doing this?" I ask.

Brenda looks at me kindly. "I am being of service," she says. Which means she's sober again, in some kind of program, or maybe she's just read a book. She carries her armful of soiled linen out of the bedroom and comes back with a fresh set. When she struggles to get the fitted sheet to stay put, I get up off the chair and help her. Then she goes to the bathroom and turns on the shower. "Come on," she says, and I pull my nightgown off over my head and stand under the water. I tilt my head to feel the warmth beating down on my cheeks, my chin, my eyelids. Tears mix with the water and wash down the drain. When I was a little girl, my mom would give me baths when I'd come home from the hospital, with Steri-Strips covering my st.i.tches. She would wash my hair, then rinse it, pouring warm water from a plastic pitcher in a gentle, carefully directed stream. She would wipe the thick, braided line of pink scar tissue that ran down the center of my chest. My beautiful girl, she would say. My beautiful, beautiful girl.

My sheets are silky and cool as pond water, but I don't lie down. I prop myself up against the headboard and rasp out the question that I've heard hundreds of times from dozens of clients. "What do I do now?"

Brenda gives a rueful smile. "You start again," she tells me. "Just like the rest of us."

Coming Summer 2015, Jennifer Weiner's latest novel is a sweeping, modern day fairy tale about first romance and lasting love.

Who Do You Love.

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