Girls Our Age by Phoebe Thompson

Three women navigate their late twenties together in a bittersweet novel about female friendship, identity, and growing up—from the hope and promise of college to the realities that lie beyond.

Lily, Ana, and Margot have been best friends ever since Hawthorne Res Life assigned them as roommates during their first year of college.

Ten years later and Lily is planning her wedding to the endlessly supportive and entirely symmetrical Jack. Ana is a fourth-grade teacher at the prestigious Horizon Academy, alma mater of her long-term boyfriend, who's finally asked her to move in. Margot is about to land a life-changing promotion at ad agency McQueen O'Doul.

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It all looks good from here.

But when the three friends converge on Maine for the wedding, the real challenges they've been able to keep from each other begin to surface. It's finally time to open up about the very private struggles they've hidden for too long and the risks they've taken to protect themselves, and those they love, from the truth.

Why I Picked It Up

I picked this one up unexpectedly. I'd seen the author's social media posts (she runs a marketing agency, and seems great at what she does) and I've liked her content before. This happened to be available under my "read in future" library tag on a night when I couldn't sleep, and the rest was history.

About the Book

I really loved this book. The writing is on the minimal side, but really nailed a lot. Within a few pages, I felt very "seen," like it was really capturing the particular problems and triumphs of my stage of life and my circle's—the types of thoughts we actually have, versus what's depicted fictionally, if that makes sense. (I'm not sure how to phrase this, but it captured some mundane slice-of-life details that made it feel very real.)

The Characters

What I loved about Girls Our Age was that even throughout friendship conflicts between the characters, Thompson did a great job not painting one person solely in the wrong. There's the lacking context and the flawed priorities at times, but you see a lot of missed connections as a reader vs. just landing on one person's side.

Fundamentally, there were a lot of feelings and contrasts and uncertainties that Thompson just absolutely nailed, especially in a time period in which peoples' experiences can be so very uneven—even when you started from the same place, or realize that you were given a completely different set of tools from somebody else.

Ana, Lily, and Margot were compellingly drawn to the extent that you understood why someone was too drunk, another got too caught up in the little things, another was being too much of a pushover in a way that inconvenienced others. Each of the pain points felt very real, and you understood how they got there and also why it caused any tension. A lot of the scenarios (moving in with a partner creating doubts, transition resurfacing an eating disorder, making a job move and then regretting it, etc.) were true-to-life while still being interesting enough.

Ana's living in San Francisco with the boyfriend she's been dating for almost a decade, and moving in with him makes her realize that they're not a great fit anymore; he earns a lot more and is condescending towards her work as a teacher, and often leaves a mess for her to clean up. She also doesn't love her new job at the elite school he grew up going to, whereas when she complains to him about it, he's much more likely to side with the social circle he grew up in. Her mom's also having dizzy spells, which is a worry in the back of her mind.

Prime example of a well-drawn feeling: on her week off for spring break, she ends up doing a lot of the household work because he's grinding—even though it's her only time off. The next day, she has to wait around for a package because he's in a meeting, which wastes one of her precious days too; by then, it's dinnertime. And I loved that dynamic, because it's so real. Phoebe Thompson can write about a small thing realistically compounding into a big feeling without the reading experience feeling boring, and that kind of frustration feels so true to life.

“They practically never fought. Their frontal lobes were fully developed, and they were thinking about getting a dog.”

“Eventually Ana had learned to stop trying to explain. That the California kids and the New York kids were just in a different league. They knew the same people from before, which didn't make any sense—why would a kid from LA go to a summer camp all the way in Maine?—but it wasn't worth getting bent out of shape over, or even trying to understand.”

Lily, meanwhile, is getting married to a wonderful partner, Jack. They've just moved to Boston so he can attend Harvard Law, and she didn't realize until she got there that there's not a great job translation for her from book publishing. Nothing sounds appealing, but she also doesn't want to be stay-at-home before she'd planned to. Sure, she has a trust, but it's more about having purpose within her day, and her people-pleasing throughout the wedding process is resurfacing the eating disorder and OCD that's been dormant for a while. She probably needs to go into inpatient treatment, but she doesn't know how to bring it up pre-wedding and it makes her feel like she's failed at something. Lily's narration, especially, had some big, striking feelings in it that were gorgeously and sensitively portrayed.

“She cared so much then: about every single solitary detail...about her math tests, which she always did well on, but hyperventilated throughout nonetheless, especially if the teacher started them late—for some reason, she thought that starting after the first seven minutes of class would make her brain go totally blank. About which of the girls in her class thought she was relevant, a word whose absence had the power to ricochet through her, rendering her entire being worthless...”

“It was just too hard, Lily thought. To be getting older and more serious and to have nothing to show for it.”

Margot, meanwhile, is on the verge of the promotion she's been working for in Chicago; she's channeled everything into work for years and it's finally about to pay off, but it's also making her snappy towards her friends and frustrated that her type-A organization abilities are being taken for granted as she's being helpful on wedding prep. The timing of the trip is just awful, and she's trying to handle her stress without radiating her stress, even though her friends will likely pick at her for not being in-the-moment with them.

“It had been sometime between Margot's grandmother dying alone in a cordoned-off hospital and her discovery that $80,000 a year was actually not that much money that she'd stopped caring quite so much, which is to say, she still cared a lot.”

“She felt more tired than she'd ever felt before. It was a sinking, heavy, all-encompassing exhaustion, one she'd never felt before but knew instinctively wouldn't be resolved by sleep...she'd never felt so incapable in her life. How had she not realized how tired she was? Surely this weight had been knocking around in the cavity of her chest for some time, trying to alert her to its presence, ricocheting across the inside of her ribs.”

Again, the writing was rather minimal, but it had a light cleverness and familiarity that made me appreciate everything it evoked. It was tender at the right times.

It's so spot on about experiences like unemployment and bachelorette parties and different levels of friendship with various roommates and perfectionism and the guilt over calling people at a good time. The friends offended each other at times for not registering that the way they'd behaved—or what they'd asked about or what they hadn't—had upset the other person, and everyone was just trying their best but still messing up. One bails at the wrong time; another is constantly bitching about the same thing she needs to get over; another hasn't been good enough at thanking people.

“I'm thirty-two years old, and I don't own my own brain. I'm just a repository of Figma files.”

Overall Thoughts

I loved Girls Our Age. It's like—because it did a lot well, it made me realize how little I'd read the feelings and transitions she'd depicted, some of which were familiar to me. The interjections and shifts each character had between thoughts felt very true to the rhythm of my life in a way that tapped into a sort of social awareness I've been missing recently—the sense of being in the thick of things.

Girls Our Age deftly captures a lot of the impossibility of keeping a dozen priorities afloat at the same time, and even had a good sense of when to resurface lightly-trodden plot threads, so I found it all constantly engaging. (Each of the characters was a perfectionist in a different way, which is probably partly why I liked them so much.) The ending was sweet, which I liked, but may not be "literary" enough for some.

I also switched off between print and audio here, and really liked the audiobook narration too!