Jennifer Close is listening in on my personal conversations. That is, after all, the only explanation for how she could write a book that so closely capture every little detail of life in one’s twenties, that strange decade when you make the shift from girl to woman (cue Britney Spears). In Girls in White Dresses, Close poignantly discusses the mistakes, life-changing decisions, and not-so-fairytale romances that so many of us deal with as we leave our teen years behind.
Girls in White Dresses follows the lives of Isabella, Mary, and Lauren, three best friends with strong personalities, opinions, and senses of self. We watch these three ladies navigate through bad dates, worse breakups, faded friendships, and lost jobs. When I sat down to read Girls in White Dresses, I expected a fluffy, yet fun, story on friendships and relationships. Instead, the novel is filled with tiny moments that capture what it means to become an adult. The big moments (like when Isabella fears losing her job or when Lauren’s long-distance boyfriend breaks up with her), are far less heartbreaking than the tiny, seemingly mundane ones, like the haunting sense that you will never get your dream job, or finding out the girl you hated in college is engaged to the boy you loved in college over your lunch break.
Each moment, no matter how weighty, is told with a bit of wit and a whole lot of wisdom. Although it’s never preachy, there is hope in Isabella, Mary, and Lauren’s stories. We watch them go through first jobs, first homes, first “real boyfriends,” first “real breakups,” all with the right balance of heartfelt emotion and sarcasm.
It would be easy to say that Girls in White Dresses is a story about relationships and, it is, but not romantic ones. It’s a story about friendship — how friends change, how the breakup of a platonic relationship is more tragically silent than a romantic one, and the power of true best friendship.