The False Friend
Myla Goldberg, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385527217
Summary
From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out...
Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afternoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.
The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.
Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contradicts Celia’s version of the past.
Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 19, 1972
• Raised—Laurel, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College, 1993
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Myla Goldberg, an American novelist and musician, was raised in Laurel, Maryland. She majored in English at Oberlin College, graduating in 1993. She spent a year teaching and writing in Prague (providing the germ of her book of essays Time's Magpie, which explores her favorite places within the city), then moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives with her husband (Jason Little) and two daughters.
While in Prague Goldberg completed her first novel, Kirkus, a story of an Eastern European circus troupe engulfed by the onset of World War II. She gave it to an agent who shopped it for 18 months, but it was not published by the time she had begun working on Bee Season, so it was shelved.
After returning to Brooklyn Goldberg took several jobs, including working on a production of a Stephen King horror movie. She was let go from that job, which brought an unforeseen benefit—the six months of unemployment benefits checks gave her sufficient time to finish Bee Season ("It was a grant, as far as I was concerned", she told an Oberlin student interviewer in 2005).
Bee Season (2000) portrays the breakdown of a family and the spiritual explorations of its two children amid a series of spelling bees. It was a popular and critical success, and was adapted into a film in 2005. Goldberg's second novel, Wickett's Remedy (2005), is set during the 1918 influenza epidemic.
False Friend (2010), her third novel, describes a woman whose memory is jogged, causing her to revisit a tragic event in her youth. "It's about memory, hometowns and the adults children turn into," Goldberg told an interviewer.
She has also published short stories in Virgin Fiction, Eclectic Literary Forum, New American Writing, McSweeney's and Harpers. She reviews books for The New York Times and Bookforum.
Goldberg is also an accomplished amateur musician. She plays the banjo and accordion in a Brooklyn-based indie rock quartet, The Walking Hellos. She has performed with The Galerkin Method and the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. She collaborates with the New York art collective Flux Factory. She has contributed song lyrics to the musical group One Ring Zero. "Song for Myla Goldberg" is track six on The Decemberists' album Her Majesty The Decemberists. It makes a handful of allusions to Bee Season. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Goldberg's unremarkable latest, a neatly constructed if hollow story of memory and deception, begins in the woods surrounding a small upstate New York town, as 11-year-old Celia watches her best friend, Djuna, get into a stranger's car, never to be seen again. At least that's the story Celia gives to the police. Twenty-one years later, Celia returns to her hometown to tell her family and old friends what really happened that fateful day, but her new version of the disappearance is met with disbelief by family and old friends. Meanwhile, Celia's image of her childhood identity is shattered as she listens to descriptions of herself as a child: she was sweet to some, cruel and bullying to others. Goldberg successfully evokes the shades of gray that constitute truth and memory, but her tendency toward self-conscious writerliness and grand pronouncements ("The unadult mind is immune to logic or foresight, unschooled by consequence, and endowed with a biblical sense of justice") prevents the narrative from breaking through its muted tones. Goldberg misplays the setup, trading psychological suspense for a routine story of self-discovery.
Publishers Weekly
The term mean girls is elevated to a new level in Goldberg's moody novel. Is there anything uglier or more damaging than the well-honed bullying techniques of middle-school girls? There's always a natural leader, and newcomer Djuna Pearson wields the power. Choosing Celia as her acolyte, Djuna designates second-tier friends, and outsider Leanne gets the brunt of their cruel teasing. For 21 years Celia manages to lock away the memories of that time, fashioning an enviable life for herself in Chicago. One day she's overwhelmed with the need to confess the lie she once told about Djuna, a falsehood that shook the solid foundation of her small town. With a deep sense of unease, readers accompany Celia on her return to Jensenville, NY, where she hopes to make amends for a transgression only she seems to be aware of. Verdict: The authenticity of the author's voice is evident when she describes the uncomfortable emotions and forgotten details that assault the adult Celia as she goes back to her childhood home. Different in theme from Goldberg's Bee Season and Wickett's Remedy, this is a layered, understated novel about the complex, ambiguous nature of memory and its effect on the dynamics of relationships. Great fodder for reading groups. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
Readers are kept guessing until the final pages and, as in Bee Season, Goldberg uses beautiful, emotionally descriptive language to keep us with one ear to the ground, listening for the slow, quiet footsteps of creeping tragedy. —Annie Bostrom
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The False Friend is set into motion when Celia remembers her friend Djuna after having managed to block out those memories for twenty years. What is it about where Celia is in her life or her relationships that may have brought this memory to the surface? Does this sort of sudden recollection make sense to you, or was it difficult for you to accept the book’s opening premise?
2. Why are Celia’s parents so reluctant to talk to Celia about Djuna? Does this seem representative of their larger relationship with their daughter? Representative of their relationship with each other?
3. How common is the sort of friendship Celia and Djuna had as girls? In what ways did their friendship and their clique seem strange or familiar to you?
4. In what ways does Celia’s relationship with her mother differ from her relationship to her father? Is one relationship healthier than another, or are they just differently functional/dysfunctional?
5. To Celia, Jensenville is a place that she can only bear to visit briefly and seldom. To Celia’s parents and to people like the town librarian, Jensenville is a fine place to live What do you think of Jensenville? What makes some people want to flee their hometown and others want to stay?
6. Do you agree with how Noreen and Warren dealt with Celia as a girl in the aftermath of Djuna’s disappearance? Do you think they could or should be blamed for Celia’s subsequent repressed memories?
7. Though Jeremy’s drug addiction and recovery is only addressed indirectly in the novel, in what ways is it an important aspect of the larger story of this family?
8. Huck liked to tease Celia that “they could have been spared years of heartache had they met earlier, but Celia disagreed Her prior love life had been too binary, the replication or repudiation of her parents consuming its earliest daisy petals.” In what ways does Celia’s relationship with Huck resemble the relationships within her family? In what ways is it different?
9. When Celia spontaneously arrives at Leanne’s house to apologize, she is told that her appearance there is only “more harm done.” Was Celia right to attempt to apologize to Leanne in person? Both Jewish tradition and the 12-step program (just to name two) assert that true forgiveness can only be achieved when we apologize to the person we have wronged. Do both parties always benefit equally?
10. What does the future hold for Huck and Celia? How do you think Celia’s trip to Jensenville will affect their relationship?
11. When Celia visits Djuna’s mother as an adult, it is very different from the experiences she remembers as a girl. Who do you think has changed more, Celia or Djuna’s mother?
12. No one agrees with Celia’s version of what happened to Djuna on the wooded road twenty years ago Who is right? Can that question be answered?
(Questions issued by publisher.)