How to Fall Out of Love Madly: A Novel

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I’ve got my friend Sophie from Paris,” Annie said, “Maybe she’ll invite me stay with her in Paris if she comes here first.

How to Fall Out of Love Madly is an honest and compelling look at female friendship, romantic relationships, and infatuation. Perceptive, mordantly funny, and full of heart, How to Fall Out of Love Madly examines women's many relationships-with one another, their mothers, their work, men, and themselves-to reveal their underlying power and complexity.Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirty-something lives aren't exactly what they'd imagined. It may have been unnecessarily fretful or even a little mean, but Joy was happy to hear Annie say it. This is a book for every woman, no matter the age - and every man as this is an education and sermon we all need equally. Each character has ONE chapter at the end of the book, ONLY ONE where they have any semblance of a spine in their own relationships, and even those chapters make concessions to their self worth and their ability to be happy outside of a relationship. I would love to tell you that it doesn’t define how I think of myself, but those are just words and they’re not making me feel what it is I want to feel and what it is that I want to feel is thinner.

Yes, she’s reaped so many opportunities because of pretty privilege but she still doesn’t feel confident in herself. When Annie moves in with her boyfriend, she thinks this is what she wants but finds herself putting on this “easy breezy cool girlfriend” act that she may not be able to keep up.

Joy knew very early on that she wasn’t in love with Ryder, and that he was at best an inappropriate choice for her and at worst a damage to her self-esteem, but she didn’t let herself acknowledge even one of those thoughts. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book.