Girls in White Dresses
Jennifer Close, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307596857
Summary
Wickedly hilarious and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.
Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and doll-sized cakes.
They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working at a mailing-list company, dizzy with the mixed signals of a boss who claims she’s on a diet but has Isabella file all morning if she forgets to bring her a chocolate muffin.
Mary thinks she might cry with happiness when she finally meets a nice guy who loves his mother, only to realize he’ll never love Mary quite as much. And Lauren, a waitress at a Midtown bar, swears up and down she won’t fall for the sleazy bartender—a promise that his dirty blond curls and perfect vodka sodas make hard to keep.
With a wry sense of humor, Jennifer Close brings us through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. These are the years when everyone else seems to have a plan, a great job, and an appropriate boyfriend, while Isabella has a blind date with a gay man, Mary has a crush on her boss, and Lauren has a goldfish named Willard.
Through boozy family holidays and disastrous ski vacations, relationships lost to politics and relationships found in pet stores, Girls in White Dresses pulls us deep inside the circle of these friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1979
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston College; M.F.A., The New School
• Currently—lives in Washington, DC
Jennifer Close is the American author of four novels, including her well known 2011 debut, Girls in White Dresses.
Close was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Boston College. After earning her B.A., she headed to New York to get her M.F.A. at The New School where, according to an interview in the Washington Post, she wrote in a male voice to "avoid being too revelatory."
After an internship at The New Yorker, she spent another year at Vogue, then landed a job with a startup magazine called Portfolio. She rose to become the assistant managing editor before the magazine closed in 2009. It was at Portfolio, while waiting for proofs to be delivered late at night, that she began typing stories about her life and the lives of her friends who found themselves on an endless cycle of weddings, showers, and bachelorette parties—events which left them exhausted and broke. Those stories eventually became the 2011 novel, Girls in White Dresses.
When her boyfriend and now husband, Tim Hartz, joined the Obama White House, Close moved to D.C. to be with him. That life has also proven a rich lode to mine—this time for her fourth book, The Hopefuls.
Novels
2011 - Girls in White Dresses
2013 - The Smart One
2013 - The Things We Need
2016 - The Hopefuls
Book Reviews
Close’s witty voice...charts the romantic shenanigans of a bevy of New York women in their 20s, before career success or Botoxed foreheads. Dating is a phenomenon to be analyzed in improvised group therapy over cocktails.
New York Times
Follows three women and peripheral friends as they alternately flounder and flourish through their 20s. Weddings provide the backdrop as the women feel their way in and out of inert relationships and crappy jobs, trying to figure out who they want to be.
Washington Post
Anyone who has seen The Sound of Music—that is, everyone—will likely recognize the title of Jennifer Close’s Girls in White Dresses as a certain Oscar Hammerstein lyric. But given the tone and tenor of this debut novel, it shouldn’t surprise that the reference isn’t particularly affectionate.... Close, who is 32, captures the extended post-collegiate ennui associated with her generation.... Quite endearing.
Elysa Gardner - USA Today
Close straddles the line between melancholy and breeziness as she chronicles the exploits of recent college grads trying to make it in New York City . . . Hints at something deeper and truer: not just the adventure of being young, but the unmooring of it, too.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Jennifer Close’s debut, Girls in White Dresses, follows a group of young women doing all the things they know they shouldn’t—falling for one’s boss, dating gay men—all while drinking far too many mimosas at other people’s weddings.
Vogue
Artfully spare prose adds a literary tinge to the chick lit staples—navigating relationships, bridesmaid duties, disappointing first jobs—explored in Close's debut collection. At their weakest, the stories owe too much to their predecessors: "The Showers," in which the recurring characters travel to a suburban bridal shower, is essentially a retelling of a snappier Sex and the City episode, and Isabella's boss in "Blind" has the dark shades of The Devil Wears Prada. The standout moments come in "The Peahens," when Abby reveals her unusual family and her struggle to fit in (she "studied hard, taking notes on the silver link bracelets all the girls wore"), and the sharp "Hope," when Shannon takes a backseat to her boyfriend's naïve political passion for "the Candidate" of a presidential campaign. Occasionally funny (as when Isabella refers to her dinner dates as "parallel eating"), but without the risk taking of The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or the deeply explored emotion of Prep, these stories will resonate with readers in the throes of the quarter-life churn who can see themselves in the cast.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Isabella, Mary, and Lauren are three friends in New York City navigating relationships, careers, early adulthood, and other people's weddings. Lauren is a real-estate agent who meets a man who could be Mr. Right—or a sociopath. Isabella is an assistant at a publishing house who suffers through a bad relationship, then meets a man who seems perfect until he asks her to move to Boston with him. Mary is a serious lawyer, married with two kids, whose husband is a perennial mama's boy incapable of grocery shopping on his own. Mixed in with the trials and tribulations of the protagonists are humorous vignettes from the lives of some of their other friends and acquaintances—many of whom are on their way to the altar or trying to find a way to get there. Verdict: This series of linked short stories is reminiscent of Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. It is modern and funny, with original, wry observations. Close's debut novel will appeal to both fans of contemporary women's fiction with a hip vibe and readers who enjoy old-school chick lit.
Library Journal
With a light touch and utterly believable characters, Close’s...appealing debut manages to capture the humor, heartache and cautious optimism of her protagonists.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you relate to most closely, and why?
2. How does Close use humor to convey character? Are the women themselves funny, or the situations they find themselves in?
3. Ambivalence—toward jobs, men, apartments, and children—is a recurring theme in Girls in White Dresses. Why do you think that is?
4. What did Isabella learn from JonBenét?
5. Several of the characters keep some pretty big secrets, such as the way Abby keeps her friends away from her hippy parents. How does this affect Abby’s life? How do the book’s other secrets affect the characters?
6. What is the metaphor of the peahen?
7. On page 98, Isabella thinks about her young nephew, Connor, “All he wanted was to know what to expect. His world didn’t look like he’d thought it would, and she understood. How could he keep calm if he couldn’t see?” Who else does this describe?
8. Why does “the ham” become so significant for Lauren?
9. Mary wonders why nobody warned her that during her first year as a lawyer, “You will be constantly afraid.” (page 120) What role does fear play in the women’s lives?
10. “Kristi and Todd stood with their shoulders touching, wrapped in the cloth. It reminded Isabella of the way that Lauren and Kristi used to huddle together, whispering and laughing at jokes that only they understood.” (page 174) Why does Isabella get so emotional during the “chuppah within a chuppah” wedding scene?
11. Connect the dots between Shannon, Dan, Barack Obama, and the contestants on “The Biggest Loser.” Why is hope so important?
12. Throughout the book, questions of identity pop up. For example, when a friend gets divorced and decides to keep her married name, Isabella thinks it may be because, “She’s afraid no one will remember who she is.” (page 249) How do these characters determine who they are? By the end, who seems to have created the strongest sense of self?
13. What is the turning point for Isabella in her relationship with Harrison?
14. Why is Lauren ready to call the turtle Mark gives her Rudy, when she wouldn’t use that name for the goldfish?
15. Discuss the last scene. How have the women changed over the course of the book? Who is the most satisfied with her life?
16. Where do you imagine Isabella, Mary, and Lauren will be in five years?
(Questions issued by publisher.)