In a much-quoted line from the pilot episode of HBO's Girls, 24-year-old Hannah Horvath tells her parents, "I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation." The line is delivered with tongue firmly planted in cheek, as Lena Dunham—the show's creator and star—is often called the voice of her generation. The show follows Hannah and her friends, who, having finished college, are now killing time while they wait for their best life to materialize (because that's what their parents said would happen). They don't think too hard about sexuality and commitment being linked. They're pretty sure their specialness will carry them through to the next act, whatever that might involve.

Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, the pair of thirtyish friends at the center of Emily Gould's debut novel Friendship, offer some clues as to what lies ahead for Hannah and her cohort. Whereas Dunham's girls are only beginning to sense their jetpacks may just be knapsacks, Gould's are firmly aware of it, having already weathered cockeyed career moves, failed relationships, and aborted runs at graduate school.

Amy (who seems to be Gould's stand-in) had a brief moment of fame on the Internet but now works at a web start-up called "Yidster" run by clueless trust-fund siblings, where she's supposed to give the "Jewish" angle on various daily events. (Mostly she just pokes around on the web all day.) She dates Sam, an artist, and spends too much money on stuff she doesn't need. Every night Sam asks her what happened on the Internet that day, prompting a sort of existential despair familiar to anyone who spends too much time clicking: "How were you supposed to describe the millions of things that had happened? And all those micro events were so inconsequential on their own but so compelling in the moment. All of them were tricking you into thinking they might eventually add up to something, and maybe they were."

Bev, Amy's best friend, has tried to be a writer—she started and then quit grad school—but she's working temp jobs for a while. Then she discovers she's pregnant, and can't quite decide what to do about it: "A baby was supposed to be the trophy you received for attaining a perfected, mature life, not another hurdle to surmount on the infinite sprint toward that infinitely receding, possibly non-existent finish line."

Amy and Bev are not 24 anymore, and their wheel-spinning isn't actually creating forward motion. Everywhere they look, they see lives they might have led if they'd taken a different turn at the fork in the road. Bev has already tossed out the roadmap she acquired growing up in a traditional, religious household: "Mostly I feel like a total failure. I mean, by the time my mom was my age, she'd had three babies. I look at my life, and it's just completely insane—laughable—to imagine bringing a child into it." But she's too far gone to have the life of her college set, who "had been friends with private school and boarding school kids who'd gravitated back to the New York area, from where they'd originated, the type of people who'd gotten all the performance art and lesbianism out of their systems before graduation and had gone on to law school or management consulting and in due time had … forged unions with men as practical and well-heeled and boring as they were."

No one could accuse Amy and Bev of selling out, but that's not much consolation as they find themselves in rental apartments with random roommates, hanging out with the wrong men, working dead-end jobs better suited for interns. Those are fine for Dunham's 24-year-olds. But what if you can't backtrack and fix it?

Not long ago, Emily Gould herself was Lena Dunham. In the middle of the last decade, she was briefly a poster child for everything that people didn't like about the Internet: an overly confessional blogger who got a book deal and became co-editor of the gossipy website Gawker. In a New York Times article in 2008, Gould wrote about getting the call from Gawker, sounding distinctly Horvathian:

For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me … . [W]hen I got the job, I had the strange and sudden feeling that it had been somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life—all the trivia I'd collected, the knack for funny meanness I'd been honing since middle school—had been leading up to this moment.

In the essay, she described what is now a matter of infamous public record—her experience at Gawker, her all-too-public confrontations with brief notoriety, and the inevitable fallout. In 2010, Free Press published her essay collection And the Heart Says … Whatever, which got her a startlingly large advance but mediocre sales. It also provoked chatter about Gould's narcissism and self-obsession. (Perhaps not wrongly: her blog was called "Emily Magazine," and she is co-owner of a feminist publishing start-up called "Emily Books.")

Friendship, however, suggests that Gould has grown up a bit since then. In an essay that appears in the collection MFA vs. NYC (published by n+1, the literary journal co-edited by Gould's boyfriend Keith Gessen; the essay was excerpted on the website Medium in early 2014), Gould explained some of the lessons she'd learned from the time after her book sold. She writes of watching Girls and hearing Dunham's line. "Dunham isn't the only person living the life I'd once felt entitled to," Gould says. "Or maybe the problem—well, a problem—was that I felt entitled to several different lives."

It is this sense of entitlement to multiple lives (the artsy recluse, the cultural maven, the confident yet sophisticated mother) that drives Friendship, and that's what keeps it true: the terror of choosing a life path, or, worse, of realizing you chose a path by default. ("Things were happening to her," the book says. "They were bad things, but at least they were happening.") Not that this is unique to a generation—but today it's easy to think you're delaying that choice, putting it off till the time is right. Recessions and education and cultural rhetoric and pop feminism have made it easy.

This is why, despite all that Gould's history might imply, Friendship is a very good, highly readable, and surprisingly mature novel, one that feels derived from rueful experience. It evokes that guilty pleasure that comes from reading well-written chick lit, but without the vapidity. Bev and Amy are types, like Dunham's characters, but they're still real. You could sit next to them on the subway.

Some things about the novel don't work—particularly the flatness of a secondary storyline with a character named Sally, who has all the trappings of the perfect life but is desperately unhappy. But Gould has developed a wry, deft manner with sentences; she's incapable of writing a boring page. Some other secondary characters, particularly the Yidster heirs, are excellent. One of them, Jonathan, spitballing about an idea for something they could do on the website, sounds familiar to anyone who's worked for a clueless boss: "How about … we pick a topic … and you can just kind of adlib about it … and then we'll edit it to be really funny and cool. We'll call it … the Daily Yid Vid!"

Friendship explores how it might be that in a cultural moment where it's plausible to stay functionally 24 forever, we still might grow up. The answer is embedded in the title. As the women's friendship takes a pummeling, they begin to make choices that will shape them and their futures for the long haul. But without their friendship, they wouldn't have made those decisions in the first place. It's our relationships with others—love, and the responsibility to another that love brings—that finally get us moving forward with purpose.

At the conclusion of her MFA vs. NYC essay, after recounting a painful period in her relationship with Gessen that she freely admits was her own fault, Gould says, "I don't know if I will ever have any of the things I once considered necessary and automatic parts of a complete adult life. I might never get married, or have children, or own a home." And yet, she says, she's made strides toward paying off her debts and taking a full-time job. With determination but a hint of resignation, she writes, "Act 1 is over—it's been over for a while—and I'm headed back into the woods." By the end of Friendship, Amy and Bev have crossed into Act 2 as well. Maybe there's still hope for Hannah Horvath.

Alissa Wilkinson is assistant professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City and Christianity Today's chief film critic.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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