Girls They Write Songs About

By: Carlene Bauer

Narrated by: Cady Zuckerman

Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

New York, 1997. As the city’s gritty edges are being smoothed into something safer and shinier, two girls meet at a music magazine. Rose—brash and self-possessed—is a staff writer. Charlotte—hesitant, bookish—is an editor. First wary, then slowly admiring, they recognize in each other an insatiable and previously unmatched ambition. Soon they’re inseparable, falling into the kind of friendship that makes you better, makes every day an adventure, and makes you believe that you will be extraordinary.

Together, Charlotte and Rose find love and lose it; they hit their strides and stumble; they make choices and live past them. But then the steady beats in their sisterhood fall out of sync. They have seen each other through so much—marriage, motherhood, divorce, career glories and catastrophes, a million small but necessary choices—what will it mean to give up their dreaming together? That the friendship that once made them sing out shuts them down? And even if they can reconcile themselves to the lives they’re living, can they survive the ones they didn’t?

As smart and comic as it is gloriously exuberant, Girls They Write Songs About takes a timeless story and turns it into a pulsing, wrecking, clear-eyed tale of two women reckoning with the lives they’ve chosen and the countless ways they—and all the women they’ve known—have made them who they are.

©2022 Carlene Bauer (P)2022 Dreamscape Media, LLC

This novel should be famous

What a brilliant novel. One of the best I’ve ever read centering on women and art and the ultimate need for women to stop competing with and judging one another, and that only this brings possible freedom. If you are Gen X or Gen X curious, just wow. This says so much about the things we were so trained not to say.

So so

It really didn’t capture me emotionally. I thought it would have pulled me in to the characters more.

What a great listen

This book was so sharp and funny and threw me back into the 90’s.

Lovely Writing

While the story didn’t always hold my attention and the characters were a bit tiring in their cynicism and pretentiousness, the writing kept me interested enough to listen to the entire book. The narrator’s nasal, flat tone was probably a big part of the reason this didn’t always hold my attention. I think she did a good job of portraying the voice of the main character in the book - I can imagine that is the way she would sound. But it just didn’t make for interesting listening.

poignant

A less fun sex in the city evoking story of female friendship, missed loves and lives. Are women allowed to choose solitude? is the grass always greener on the other side? Can a woman choose to be single for life or parent alone? from the 70s to now, how does the life a d choices a woman can make change, age and progress (or regress?)

Good snapshot of a time and place

Really thought I would like this more but characters ran a little flat and two dimensional. I will say that her writing kept
me listening.