I'm So Happy for You

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

Genres: Coming of Age; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

What if your best friend, whom you've always counted on to flounder in life and love (making your own modest accomplishments look not so bad), suddenly starts to surpass you in every way? Wendy's best friend, Daphne, has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. If Daphne veers from suicidal to madly in love, Wendy offers encouragement. But when Daphne is suddenly engaged, pregnant, and decorating a fabulous town house in no time at all, Wendy is . . . not so happy for her. Caught between wanting to be the best friend she prides herself on being and crippling jealousy of flighty Daphne, Wendy takes things to the extreme, waging a full-scale attack on her best friend -- all the while wearing her best, I'm-so-happy-for-you smile -- and ends up in way over her head. Rosenfeld has a knack for exposing the not-always-pretty side of being best friends -- in writing that is glittering and diamond-sharp. I'm So Happy For You is a smart, darkly humorous, and uncannily dead-on novel about female friendship.

Release date: July 9, 2009

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Karen Kipple had always been an early riser. She relished the quiet, the calm, the way the light filtered through the sycamore tree in front of her south-facing kitchen window, and the sensation of having the house to herself, if only for an hour or two. Was it terrible to admit that she never loved her daughter and husband so much as when they were asleep? She also liked studying the forecast while she drank her first cup of coffee of the day—checking projected temperatures against monthly averages and feeling appropriately blessed or outraged. As a child, Karen had made fun of grown-ups who were always going on about the weather; what could be duller? But as she’d gotten older, she’d found herself endlessly diverted by the seeming randomness and unpredictability of the sky overhead.

Karen had been married for ten years and, for the last five of them, had been the director of development for a small nonprofit devoted to tackling childhood hunger in the United States. For the past two years, she’d also been trying to write an op-ed, which she hoped one day to publish in a major news-paper, about the relationship between nutrition and school readiness. Like many women, she struggled to balance the demands of motherhood and career, always convinced that she was shortchanging one or the other. But it was also true that, insofar as she’d long conflated leisure with laziness, her eight-year-old daughter, Ruby, provided her with a permanent alibi in the criminal case of Karen Kipple versus herself. Thanks to Ruby, Karen always felt busy and needed even when she wasn’t officially working. And the permanent sense of obligation came by and large as a relief.

The only part of Karen’s domestic routine that she consistently dreaded was. . .