After spending college in her best friend’s shadow, Wendy Murman has emerged into adulthood as the more successful of the pair. She’s an editor at an important political magazine and married to a great guy. True, she can’t seem to get pregnant. And OK, she’s never been a great beauty. But she’s happy—until the tables turn.
In the span of a week, Wendy’s best friend, Daphne Uberoff, flips from threatening suicide because of her distress over a married lover to falling in love with an available, age-appropriate lawyer Wendy almost instantly dislikes.
When things start going well for Daphne, Wendy becomes argumentative, quickly growing frustrated with her husband for the little things (the fact that she has to walk the Doberman Pinscher while he visits his father in the hospital) and the big (her inability to conceive). As she becomes even more obsessed with fertility, her resentment toward friends—especially those with kids or newfound happiness—grows and grows. “Envy was a bulldozer emotion,” Wendy says—and in Wendy’s case, envy invites comparison and critique of her social circle.
In I’m So Happy for You, Lucinda Rosenfeld turns her attention from the romantic dilemmas of her past work to the dark side of female friendships. The book retains the humorous and often satirical tone of Rosenfeld’s novels, What She Saw. . . and Why She Went Home, while building on the female friendship articles she’s penned for the New York Times Magazine.
I’m So Happy for You is an amusing and chilling look at the less frequently explored one-upmanship of some female friendships. And while Wendy’s psychotic behavior pushes people away, Rosenfeld will only draw fans closer with this masterful cautionary tale.
Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama, where she’s fortunate to have lots of friends and few “frenemies”—that she’s aware of, at least.
