The novel’s very first words are “my mother,” followed by her advice that “to be a girl one must be especially clever.” Isa’s long nails “made my hands look slender and elegant, like my mother’s.” Her mother “wrote in journals with long strokes.” I was surprised, amid the picklebacks and imitation Pucci-print, to find myself crying at several points throughout-something Isa no longer does, she says, “because anything in comparison to that one thing seems stupid.” Her mother (like Granados’) died when Isa was a teenager, and she fills her diary with poignant remembrances-it’s a book about coping with grief as much as it is one about charming a crowd. Her effervescent tone belies a sadness that only really breaks the surface late in the narrative. Later she writes, “Some things happen that are probably best not to write about, so I have to pick out certain things I know I want to remember.” And: “I know better than to waste too much space on men here if only that could translate to real life.” All diaries are constructs of their creators, but Isa is a particularly knowing self-mythologizer: “I’ll admit I always write it like it would be read,” she coyly tells another new pal.

“There are some things I have never even put in my diary,” Isa tells one admirer.

If you’ve read about this book but have not yet read this book, you likely imagine it to be a confection of cocktails, rooftop flirtations, bright dresses, and the joys and melancholy of Female Friendship-which, indeed, it is! But while I found the narrator’s jaunts through the glitz and grime of New York in the summer hugely entertaining, what I was most drawn to about the novel, which takes the form of diary entries written by 21-year old Isa Epley, a cash-strapped recent arrival to Brooklyn by way of London, were the nods to what may be going on off-page.

Grey mother the long dark