Girls They Write Songs About

April 4, 2022
Bauer’s appealing if aimless latest (after Frances and Bernard) follows the friendship of two women in New York City from the late 1990s through the aughts. Charlotte Snowe and Rose Pellegrino apply for a staff editor job at a music magazine, and that’s where they meet; Rose gets the job and Charlotte eventually gets hired as an editor. The two quickly develop a close bond, but jealousies both romantic and professional eventually rear their heads. When Rose sets aside her writing commitments to marry Peter, Charlotte takes it as a personal affront and it eventually becomes a wedge between them, and as one ascends in her career, the other’s decline is put into greater relief. There’s not much of a plot, just a bunch of time in bars, clubs, and restaurants and conversations that don’t quite pass the Bechdel test (lots of talk about men, their bosses, relationships, and sex), and by the end it just sort of fizzles out. Still, Bauer has a talent for exacting language, particularly when describing the characters’ attempts at navigating an era in which it feels like feminism is over (“We were neither selfish enough nor selfless enough to become heroines”). There are better stories of moving to the city, but this makes for a charming enough time capsule. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

May 1, 2022
Bauer's follow-up to her debut, Frances and Bernard (2013), is a gimlet-eyed look at the complexities of the friendship between two women over decades as they wrestle with career ambitions and romantic entanglements. Charlotte and Rose meet in their twenties in the twilight of the 1990s at a music magazine where Charlotte is assigned to edit Rose's work. Their initial adversarial relationship, given Rose's resistance to Charlotte's edits, and their shared attraction to their handsome but remote boss soon give way to a deep friendship, in large part predicated on their similar writing ambitions and predilection for artistic, soulful men. But Charlotte's writing career soon eclipses Rose's, and then Rose opts for a marriage that offers more financial security than it does passion, pulling their trajectories further and further apart. Told from Charlotte's point of view, Bauer's second novel questions the choices women are forced to make as they age, and the way those decisions unite or divide them. Bauer offers no easy answers nor pat conclusions, and her layered tale is all the stronger for it.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
A deep friendship takes shape and dissolves in New York City. "Rose and I moved to New York to be motherless," begins narrator Charlotte as she sweeps us into the idealism of her 20s in the late-1990s New York literary scene. She and Rose meet in the office of a music magazine where Rose--intense, ambitious, erratic--works in the staff writer position for which Charlotte--meticulous, careful, self-effacing--was passed over. What begins as professional and sexual jealousy morphs into an intimate friendship as the two bond over their commitment to independence and artistic integrity. Alcohol-soaked parties, abortions, marriages, affairs, a divorce, a death in the family, secrets, and betrayals all ensue, related with such cleareyed precision and honesty that only on the rarest of occasions does it tip over into sentimentality. Charlotte's narration rings true for the discerning writer and editor she is; the prose is razor-sharp and utterly devoid of clutter. Though as a person she drifts and waffles--"What did we want?" is a common refrain throughout--as a storyteller, she never loses focus. Motherless though Charlotte had once aspired to be, as her 20s turn into her 30s and early 40s, the question of motherhood creeps in, whether from her surroundings in stroller-laden Park Slope, from friendships that drift when children arrive, or from a confrontation with the child of a married man with whom she's had an affair. With deftness and candor, Bauer tells a moving and thoughtful story of how desire and ambition change over time and how to make sense of the messiness of carving out a path and life of one's own. A smart and beautifully rendered portrait of two women's lives.

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