(Scribner, $24)
“Friendship between women generally is not easy,” said Emily Rapp in The Boston Globe. In her “occasionally uneven” but “remarkably written” new memoir, the writer Susanna Sonnenberg makes sure we know this by examining numerous of her female friendships that fell apart or flamed out. But even among her enduring comrades—the ones recognizable to readers as the kind who end up guiding each of us through life—“there are no pure or magical muses.” Unsparing honesty is one of Sonnenberg’s core traits, and her “exquisitely rendered” portraits of her many friends allow us to see them whole, in all their guises—“feisty, edgy, problematic, fantastic, sexy, ambitious, secretive, neurotic, playful, intelligent, big-hearted, and fierce.” So vivid are they that we come to recognize that a friend is a type of mirror by which we come to recognize ourselves.
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Sonnenberg can at times be “exasperating,” said Susan Chira in The New York Times. This book would have been stronger if “edited more tightly”: For all of its “arresting” prose, it goes on too long and can feel narcissistic. But She Matters will inspire many readers to undertake an inventory of their own to recall, weigh, and salute the friendships that have shaped them. To pay those friends as grand a tribute as Sonnenberg has paid hers, they’ll have to be tough on themselves. “In the end, that determination to learn from the women who are close to her, to investigate where she failed and where they did, is what gives the book such resonance.”
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