Meeting New People: A Novel

by Daniel M. Lavery

From the author of the national bestseller Women’s Hotel, the irresistible and wildly entertaining story of one woman contending with age and friendship—a narrative that reads like an homage to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.

Sixtysomething, twice-divorced Barbara is at a crossroads. In the midst of her emotional uncertainty, she looks back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life, in hopes of figuring out how to optimize finding her tenth, and hopefully last, best friend. Barbara is acerbic, opinionated, and wrong about many things, but she also doesn't shy away when she's at fault. The turning point of her predicament comes from Barbara’s choice, in friends, between (too-young) Caitlyn and the (unsuitable) Other Barbara. Will she repeat the exciting mistakes of the past, or will she try a new kind of mistake for a change? She feels like an out-of-season Scrooge who is unexpectedly, and all at once, surprised and entirely transformed by the possibility of joy.

For readers who loved Bobby Finger's The Old Place and Elif Bautman's Either/Or, Meeting New People will feel like a long-lost companion—Lavery at the height of his storytelling powers. It is an unforgettable novel from one of our most inventive and brilliant writers.

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, LGBT, Friendship, Adult Fiction

278 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2026

About the author

Daniel M. Lavery is the “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster.

Reviews

[Erin]

ARC for review. To be published June 2, 2026.


DNF at 35%.

This was a well-written, good book about the failure of the main character’s female friendships, or at least what I read of it was. I just found it unbearably sad, and perhaps parts of it hit a little too close to home. I wasn’t in the right headspace to finish it at the moment. Definitely no knock on the book.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The way it was written made it to be a an audiobook I was very invested it eventough I did not like the main characters. Its a good book but it was not what I had wanted to but could really be that I didn't read the blurb closely enough. The book is really about the main character rather toxic behaviour and unableness to keep friends where I wanted more a story of someone struggles with friendships, the ups and down and not always being because of their behaviour.

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally nothing happens in this entire book and yet it physically pains me to not know what happens after the last page.

[Komal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining read.

It could go either way for a reader so practice caution.
Barbara's opinion might set you off, but it also gives you a glimpse into the central issue of this book : Why does Barabara keep losing friends?

She has some very strong opinions on almost everything which makes her pretty exhausting and a taxing companion to be with but Barbara is determined to find a new best friend and transform herself into a kinder person.

I absolutely enjoyed peeking into her life and I want to know what happened after the last page. 😭

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel M. Lavery’s Meeting New People follows Barbara, a woman who seems perpetually baffled by her inability to maintain friendships, despite leaving a trail of strained relationships behind her. Through Barbara’s observations, complaints, explanations, and endless justifications, the novel invites readers into her worldview as she navigates social interactions and attempts to understand why meaningful connections never seem to last. The premise is deceptively simple, but Lavery uses it to explore the gap between how we see ourselves and how others experience us.

What makes the book interesting is that Barbara is not especially easy to spend time with. She is crabby, long-winded, rigid in her opinions, and often exhausting. As the story progresses, I found myself increasingly understanding why her friendships struggle. Lavery writes her with enough self-awareness to make her funny and enough blindness to make her frustrating. The humor often feels deeply sarcastic, as though the author is quietly inviting readers to recognize the disconnect between Barbara’s perception of herself and the reality unfolding around her.

In fact, I began to suspect that this discomfort is the entire point of the novel. We, the readers, become Barbara’s newest friend. We are the ones listening to her stories, enduring her tangents, and trying to stay patient as she talks herself in circles. And, just as so many people seem to do in Barbara’s life, I eventually found myself wanting to step away. Oddly enough, that reaction made me appreciate the book more. Whether I enjoyed the experience is another question entirely, but I suspect Lavery accomplished exactly what he set out to do.

[Cora]

Got almost half way through, but it was torture. I’d rather get a root canal.

[Stephanie Wilen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A witty novel about a woman in her sixties reflecting on the friendships that shaped her life as she searches for connection, joy, and a sense of belonging.

I eventually grew to find Barbara endearing, but she is a fickle, neurotic woman who can be harsh and frustrating at times. Some of her views felt outdated and lacking in inclusivity, which occasionally made her difficult to root for. However, I did appreciate that she was willing to learn and grow. At its core, this is a thoughtful exploration of friendship, aging, loneliness and the idea that it’s never too late to start over.

[gracie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about a woman who has an opinion on every single thing, and her struggles with maintaining friendships throughout her life and now in her older years. I really enjoyed this mostly because I read it as an audiobook because I know I'd have been annoyed less than 50 pages in if not lol. Lavery is an incredible writer and that's very evident in how well this flows and comes together from start to finish.

ps. I have no idea why this is tagged as queer when the main character isn't queer and neither is the story being told. I found out the author is queer but if that's why it's tagged as such, that's a very stupid reason

[Skylar McKay · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is my favorite read this year. gave me similar vibes to olive by elizabeth strout. wow

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like hearing gossip and hot takes from a favorite co-worker.

[Jacqueline Firkins]

This is a tricky one for me to review, and I think, perhaps, since I had wildly incorrect expectations about it, the best use I can make of this space is to help others set their expectations, hoping this book finds the readers who are most likely to love it. I went into it expecting a relatable, complex story about a woman in her 60s struggling to understand the evolution of past friendships and form new friendships in the face of her increasing loneliness. A book that said to readers: you’re not alone in this. It’s hard. It’s complicated. But -maybe- there’s a way out of the loneliness. Instead, this read to me as a critique of those feelings, and it’s in the same family as Yellowface or Yesteryear, not in tone, humour, or genre, but in that all 3 are character studies used for social critique, and all 3 present us with an increasingly alienating heroine whose behaviour becomes more reprehensible the longer the reader spends time with the narrative. In this one, the heroine’s reasons for not keeping or forming new friendships become glaringly obvious to the reader early on in the story, as her complaints, criticisms, judgments, and narrow-minded opinions mount. She has something negative to say about everyone and everything, including lesbians, the homeless, Jesus, how women age, how women talk about age, how women date, vegetarianism, meditation, acceptable hair lengths, email etiquette, and dog ownership, with her comments growing more biting, self-aggrandizing, and hypocritical throughout the novel while she outsources her character growth to god and approaches every social interaction--even the most outwardly charitable ones--with an eye for what she can gain. She talks about wanting to change, but has a million reasons not to. The only things she seems to genuinely care about are her food and furniture, certainly not her own son, and even more certainly, anyone she wants to befriend. So to me, this read as a critique of older women who complain about being lonely while relentlessly considering themselves superior to everyone else and yet somehow not understanding why people don’t like them, making this best suited for readers who want to engage with that social critique, and who enjoy the inner monologue of a self-important woman who has something politely demeaning to say about everything and everyone but her sofa and her souffle.

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐️ This story follows Barbara Foerster, a twice-divorced woman in her late 50s whose best friend abruptly ends their friendship. Determined to understand what went wrong, Barbara looks back on the nine most important relationships of her life while searching for a new best friend.

The reader is taken along with Barbara as she revisits old relationships, misunderstandings, and patterns of behaviour. Romantic relationship break ups are written about often, but the loss of close friendships can be just as, if not more devastating and this story is touching and thought-provoking. Lavery does a good job of weaving humour and emotional insight together. I enjoyed the interiority of this book, told in first person. I felt like I really started to understand Barbara by the end of the story. Her thoughts, recollections, and observations felt relatable and reminiscent of some of Elizabeth Strout’s characters.

I enjoyed my time in Barbara’s world, enhanced by Marcia Gay Harden’s fabulous narration!

The book might be for you if:

💜 You enjoy deep character exploration at a slower pace
💜 You are a fan of writers like Elizabeth Strout
💜 You enjoy a New York setting

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperAudio Adult for an advanced listener’s copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery.

HarperVia, thank you for the gifted copy.

This book surprised me.

I went in expecting a story about making friends later in life. Instead, I found myself spending a few days inside the head of Barbara, a fifty-eight-year-old woman whose best friend has just broken up with her. Not drifted away. Not gotten busy. Actually broken up with her.

And honestly? That hit harder than I expected.

Barbara is not the kind of character you’re supposed to instantly love. She’s stubborn, judgmental, occasionally cranky, and has an opinion about absolutely everything. More than once I found myself thinking, “Oh Barbara, please stop talking.” Then a few pages later she’d say something so honest that I’d have to admit she had a point.

What stayed with me most was how real the loneliness felt. Not dramatic, movie-style loneliness. The quieter kind. The kind that sneaks up on you when life looks different than you thought it would and the people who once felt permanent aren’t there anymore.

A lot of this book is Barbara reflecting on the friendships that shaped her life and trying to understand why so many of them ended. It’s thoughtful, funny in a dry sort of way, and surprisingly emotional. There isn’t a ton of action here. The story lives almost entirely inside Barbara’s thoughts, which I know won’t work for every reader, but I found myself settling into her voice and enjoying the ride.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Women are really incredible. I don’t mean that it’s fun to lose a man’s affection, because of course it isn’t. But there’s nothing in the world as immovable as a woman who’s finished with you.”

That line practically jumped off the page.

I also loved that this book treats friendship as something important enough to grieve. We spend so much time talking about romantic heartbreak, but losing a close friend can leave a hole that feels just as big. This story gives that kind of loss the space it deserves.

If you enjoy character-driven literary fiction, complicated women, sharp observations about getting older, and stories that feel a little like sitting across the table from someone telling you the truth about themselves, flaws and all, I think this one is worth picking up.

And now I’m curious: what’s harder to get over—a breakup with a partner or a breakup with a friend?

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book surprised me in the best way, but of course because it’s a Daniel M. Lavery joint. Barbara is such a messy, opinionated, and funny main character that I couldn't stop reading, even when she was driving me crazy. After her best friend Susan suddenly ends their friendship with a list of complaints, Barbara starts looking back on all the friendships she's lost while trying to figure out how to make one lasting connection. Her observations are hilarious, and I loved how the book explored friendship, loneliness, motherhood, and getting older in such an honest way.

What I liked most was that Barbara doesn't magically become a different person. Instead, she slowly grows through her relationships with coworkers, exes, and even the strangers she meets through hospice volunteering. The ending felt hopeful without being unrealistic, and Lavery balanced humor and emotion perfectly. He writes older women so well! This was smart, funny, and surprisingly moving, an easy five stars for me.

[Kaleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite genres of books is the complainy older lady, and this may be the definitive complainy older lady book (although Barbara is not actually as old as she comes across).

Barbara's most recent best friend has just dumped her, and it sets her on a longwinded reflection as she searches for a replacement. She is bitchy and mostly right (I think my enjoyment stems from agreeing with many of her observations and judgments) and has thoughts about everything and everyone. She's vicious and ruthless but funny. Hilarious even. She's the type of friend I am and the type of friend I like.

The thing is, the entire novel is mostly just her going on tangents about things. The plot and action are super thin. I wish there had been more of her interacting with old friends or potential friends or foes to create some tension and break to the onslaught... but as a representation of the unfettered tirades of a complainy older lady's mind presented as a sort of cockamamie self-help guide, I can't actually complain. Very funny, highly recommended.

I listened to the audiobook which was narrated by Marcia Gay Harden and her delivery was delightful. I'm pretty sure this added to my enjoyment of the book.

[Jessica Breslin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love a character study of a quirky New York woman of a certain age-stop right here because this is perfection. Read by Marcia Gay Hardin-it was literally a plum of a novel! Chef’s kiss.

[Anita Guadagno lince · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. Quirky and I didn’t want it to end!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

She Would Rather Feed You Than Tell You She Needs You
Daniel M. Lavery’s “Meeting New People” serves up casseroles, grievances, burnt paprika, and one of the sharpest recent novels about friendship, pride, and the social uses of food.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 5th, 2026


A room made ready for more people than one woman can confidently count on – Daniel M. Lavery’s “Meeting New People” distilled into late light, disciplined beauty, and the risky grace of laying extra places anyway.

Barbara Foerster would rather feed you than tell you she needs you. Daniel M. Lavery’s “Meeting New People” knows how costly that instinct can be. When Barbara’s closest friend Susan comes over for dinner, arrives with a handwritten list of complaints, and ends the friendship instead of eating, the scene lands with the dry sting of social humiliation. Susan refuses the meal, walks out in one of Barbara’s shirts, and leaves the apartment smelling of singed paprika. A friend breakup with notes is bad enough. A friend breakup with notes after you have bloiled the spices for goulash is practically liturgical.

At first the novel pretends to be a hunt for Susan’s replacement. Barbara, pushing sixty and newly unmoored, starts auditing the nine best friendships of her life, all broken or shed along the way, as if a sufficiently exact inventory might reveal how to secure a tenth and final one. Susan’s departure seems to set the terms: either Barbara finds the right woman to stand where Susan once stood, or she submits to social shrinkage. Very quickly, though, “Meeting New People” turns into a harsher, stranger, and much more interesting book than its title advertises. It is less interested in finding Barbara one sufficient person than in asking how she is meant to go on arranging a life once no single person can be trusted to hold it upright.

Lavery refuses Barbara the dignity of a contained crisis. He makes her drag the whole mess into the next room. She quarrels with her grown son Ezra over childcare, hotel rooms, antique furniture, and the ordinary insolence of adult children who think their parents can be redesigned to fit a travel schedule. At the upscale Brooklyn market hall where she works, she spars with younger coworkers over Narcan, self-checkout, bathrooms, and the moral jurisdiction of a deli counter. She starts haunting Saint Stephen’s, an Episcopal church that shares a building with a Zen center. She backs into hospice work. She begins, almost against her own habits, to treat her impossible ground-floor neighbor Lorraine like a person. She calls Marc, the widower of an old best friend who cut her off before dying, and manages – miracle of miracles – not to use the conversation as a crowbar into the past. By the time the novel reaches its final movement, Barbara is planning a dinner party whose guest list keeps expanding just as her hope of finding one perfect replacement grows less convincing.

Lavery knows what fiction still likes to underrate: friendship in adult life is not decorative padding around the real plot. It is one of the structures keeping the day from collapsing inward. Barbara’s devastation after Susan leaves is not framed as softer or more embarrassing than divorce. It hurts with the force many novels still reserve for marriage. More to the point, the novel is shrewd about how little public language exists for this kind of loss. Divorce has paperwork. Bereavement has casseroles. A friendship breakup often leaves one person clutching leftovers and the other in possession of the story. Barbara knows this. She also knows – with a braid of vanity, realism, and panic – that getting older makes new intimacy harder to come by and harder to seek without looking as though one is trying to come by it.

Barbara is such a good narrator because Lavery never launders her. She is exacting, class-tuned, funny, often cruel, often right, and almost pathologically alert to bad form. She has theories about dessert personalities, old women in cap sleeves, the vulgarity of self-checkout, the moral weather of athleisure, and the slow death of usable social rituals. She can be monstrous in miniature. She can also be ruthlessly exact. She would curdle into a recital of good lines if Lavery did not understand that style is the shell she keeps polishing while the injury is fresh. Barbara explains because explanation gives her leverage over pain. She categorizes because categories keep abandonment from feeling infinite. She turns to recipes at moments of distress not because cooking distracts her from feeling, but because food is the language in which she can think most fluently.

Everything here depends on the sentence knowing when Barbara is clarifying and when she is armoring. Lavery writes long, tensile, beautifully managed sentences that let her move from anecdote to refinement to analogy to verdict without sounding merely busy. The syntax does not ramble so much as open another drawer. A remark about tablecloths becomes an account of class aspiration. A note on potatoes becomes a theory of temperament. A complaint about texting becomes a small anatomy of modern intimacy. The diction lives among spice tins, sideboards, hems, church handbills, bad countertops, old coats, and better shoes. Barbara is forever telling one thing from another. That habit is both her charm and her trouble.

Food is not décor here. It is Barbara’s domestic logic. She cooks to welcome, to court, to comfort, to remember, to tidy the mind after injury, to put shape around loneliness, to make an evening mean something. If Susan’s refusal bites so hard, it is because she rejects not just dinner but the thing Barbara speaks best. Later, when Barbara sends a green lasagna to Marc and Holly, or brings clafoutis and Dutch baby downstairs to Lorraine, the book shows her trying to reroute that same language away from private grievance and toward social tact. Food in this novel is not atmosphere. It is thought with butter in it.


The room after Susan’s exit – red velvet, cooling dinner, and the peculiar humiliation of having your best language refused.

The structure only looks loose if you mistake drift for design. What begins as a single problem – Susan is gone, therefore someone else must be found – slowly becomes a series of awkward social experiments. Church strips some authority from Barbara’s old scripts. Hospice strips a little more. Lorraine does more than either. Caitlyn, a younger coworker Barbara first imagines as a possible successor to Susan, matters less as a destined friend than as evidence of Barbara’s habitual mistake: she keeps wanting intimacy on terms so precise that ordinary attachment can scarcely survive them. Lavery’s smartest refusal is simply not to reward that fantasy. Caitlyn does not become the answer. Neither does church. Neither does Ezra, Marc, or the other Barbara. What emerges instead is a messier arrangement of loyalties, obligations, appetites, and half-successful acts of tact.

That larger, makeshift circle is where the novel stops performing its intelligence and starts hurting. It earns its authority in scenes no one would call glamorous. Barbara sits with Deborah, a hospice patient too near death for conversation, and learns that presence can matter even when recognition cannot. She begins visiting Nita, an eighty-one-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s, and discovers the odd relief of being useful inside someone else’s mother-daughter quarrel rather than starring in her own. Most beautifully, she undergoes something very close to conversion in her dealings with Lorraine. Lorraine starts as comic blight: suspicious, nosy, forever complaining, dragging behind her a huge miserable dog. Then one rainy night Barbara sees her barefoot and without her false teeth, peering over a yard strewn with broken garbage, and the relation changes all at once. Barbara drops to her knees in the rain, picking up wet coffee grounds, broken glass, soaked dog bags, and old tampons with a kind of relieved gratitude. She is thankful not only that Lorraine is safe, but that she no longer has to act badly toward her.


Barbara in the rain among spilled garbage – the novel’s hinge, where contempt gives way to service and neighborliness arrives looking nothing like virtue.

That is the hinge of the novel. Barbara does not need to become nicer in the vague, cosmetic sense. She needs to become less impossible. Lavery is too intelligent to pretend this happens through insight alone. It happens through repeated, slightly humiliating acts of service: answering Ezra briefly instead of expansively, calling Marc without prying, reading to the dying, walking Lorraine’s dog though she does not even like the creature very much. The book’s boldest idea is that service can outlast perfect mutual understanding. That is not a diminished vision of companionship. It is a sterner one, and a more persuasive one.

The cost of letting Barbara dominate so completely is that other people can sometimes feel overexposed to her weather. Susan remains, by design, partly caught inside Barbara’s account of her. Caitlyn never entirely escapes the pressure of functioning as Barbara’s hoped-for next thing. Even Ezra, whose position is fundamentally legible, reaches us mostly through Barbara’s mix of tenderness, irritation, and hurt pride. The novel thins everyone else a little in order to keep Barbara this fully oxygenated. That is a real cost. There are moments, especially in the middle, when Barbara’s theories arrive faster than new pressure does, and the book risks worrying the same seam – age, standards, grievance, bad manners – before it has quite earned another pass.

Even that circling tells on Barbara. Lonely people repeat themselves. Grieving people do. People trying to control the terms on which they are loved certainly do. What saves the novel from cleverness is that it never mistakes Barbara’s eloquence for immunity. She can explain almost anything except the one thing she most wants explained: why other people tire of her while she is still busy refining the terms of their attachment. In that sense the book has a distant kinship with Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend,” which also treats companionship as serious business, though Lavery’s world is more upholstered, more exasperated, and much more interested in sauce.

The novel presses on a very contemporary bruise without mistaking itself for a dispatch. Adult friendship now has to do work once distributed across marriage, family, neighborhood, parish, and habit, yet it still has almost none of the rituals that help us survive its failure. It also knows something less discussable: friendliness is not the same as wanted company. Barbara is surrounded by people who are decent, welcoming, and available. That is not enough. What she lacks, and what Lavery keeps anatomizing, is belief in the irreducible value of this person’s attention. That distinction is snobbish, painful, true to experience, and one of the reasons the book keeps humming after it ends.

I’d put “Meeting New People” at 91/100 – 5/5: a genuinely excellent novel, often exhilarating at the sentence level, occasionally a little too enamored of its own best flourishes, and wiser by the end than its title first lets on. Lavery’s best move is not to hand Barbara one dazzling new best friend and call that growth. He gives her something messier, lonelier, and truer: a son she must speak to more carefully, dying strangers who require her presence, an old friend she can reenter tactfully, a neighbor she can no longer afford to despise, and a dinner table that keeps acquiring names, obligations, and plates. The book opens on a woman undone that one person no longer wants the thing she makes best. It leaves her setting more places than she can confidently fill. That turns out to be not defeat but form – a life no longer organized around one crowned intimacy, but around the risk of laying extra places anyway.


Early thumbnail studies testing the table’s angle, the window’s pull, and the burden of empty space – the first search for a composition that could hold hospitality, solitude, and expectation in the same breath.


The faint pencil scaffold beneath the looseness – measured lines establishing the table, chairs, border, and negative space before emotion was allowed to enter by way of paint.


The first wash laying in the novel’s true weather – late light, cool interior shadow, and the first suggestion that this prepared room might be poised between anticipation and aftermath.


Palette studies drawn from the cover’s muted logic – testing wood, linen, peony, shadow, and evening light until the painting’s loneliness could feel composed rather than decorative.

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Border studies searching for a frame equal to the novel’s rituals of taste and hospitality – plate echoes, molding rhythms, and domestic order pared down until they could hold without fussing.


Handwritten placement studies for title, author, and signature – testing how the lower text could settle into the painting like part of the room rather than an addition laid on top of it.

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.

[Soniaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.9

[thebookybird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara’s best friend just broke up with her. As a sixty something woman she can’t fathom this late in life departure of ways and begins to reflect on her life and friendships and the task at hand, finding a new best friend.

Barbara is a pill, she is the epitome of privileged boomer energy and yet I found her character’s brutal honesty and off base opinions rather hilarious and refreshing at times. Barbara seems so set in her ways yet there are these surprises of joyfulness and discovery that sing. She is rather unlikeable a curmudgeon with the self awareness that only hits when it suits and yet we all know a Barbara and this makes her character study so fun to unwind.

Lavery is clever, the way he explores the notions of loss for those still here, how friendship is often overshadowed by grief or the dissolution of romantic relationships and yet we see how complex it is to navigate and move through. I appreciated the story for its candour and ability to probe at the language of platonic connection. This is a divisive book not everyone will enjoy Barbara’s brand of opinionated, but I sure did.

[Lisa]

This is a 4 star book for me that got tipped into the 5 star bucket with the inclusion of my favorite topic (apparently): grief!

This caught my eye because it was written by Daniel Lavery, whose work I often enjoy, but theoretically, I'm down for books generally with an older female protagonist, especially when the focus is not heterosexual romance. So, an older women who is concerned about friend breakups? A woman of any age focused on friendship and self-reflection? Sign me up!

And I enjoyed the book, but I would love to hear from women the narrator's age, and women older than the narrator, on how this book felt. I'm younger than the narrator but felt like she was distinctly old-fashioned -which is fine, but was a bit jarring in reading a book about someone navigating this time. I almost wished the book had been set maybe 20 years ago. (Also, I had to look up who Alan Watts is, and I wonder about his influence in the book, and if this is another thing that would have been more appropriate had the book been set at an earlier time??) Similarly, I felt the narrator was so removed from her body (notably, when she mentions her sexual experiences with women) that that also felt old-fashioned to me, but I'm sure is also true to people's experiences. Finally, I'm guessing that her thoughts on food are supposed to reflect her experiences as well, but they struck me as pretty odd, especially for someone who is so interested in food. ("But everybody eats too much nowadays, anyhow." ??? " I think this is mostly because I haven’t let myself get fat, even though seemingly everybody else has these days." Is it weird that I wondered where GLP1s were for this book?) But maybe this is all quite accurate and/or supposed to inform the reader about the character. I can see how this shows her as being very "stuck" - for example "People seem to have forgotten this, but for decades, probably longer, certainly for my entire life up until about a few years ago, your diet was a perfectly ordinary, perfectly civil topic of conversation." - I wonder if by the end of the book, she might be able to conjure up other topics that might have been acceptable at other times, but aren't now, or vice versa.

For the first half of the book, I wondered if the narrator would change at all, and then I guess the plot of the book is that she notices she has these broken friendships, decides she needs to change, goes to church/"Buddhist church" once although this I guess is a rekindling of her past experiences, and does sort of an about-face where she kind of abruptly changes her actions slightly, notably by praying in a pretty secular way, volunteering at a hospice, and walking her recalcitrant neighbor's dog which seems to like bring everyone in the building together. I guess that's a fine plot, although everything seemed a bit arbitrary and minor to me. Which is also fine! Can people change? Especially stubborn people?

Anyway, despite all of this, I think overall I related to the main character quite a bit, to the extent that I wonder about the readings that find her to be "unpleasant" or "out of touch." She seemed pretty aware to me, and even worse perhaps, aware of when she's getting it wrong: "cataloguing all of my offenses, and charging me with, among other things, not being supportive enough about her having a baby. This was really news to me, especially because Susan doesn’t have a baby. She hasn’t even tried to have a baby. ... “You know, I just feel really sorry for you.” Well, that was not the right thing for her to say, either. That is never the right thing to say. “I feel sorry for you” is what people say when they’re so angry with you that they’ll never admit to being angry ever again." I THINK we're supposed to understand that she's spent her entire life losing best friends, but is this partially because she pays attention to that, or is aware of it? This book made me wonder about friends that, from my perspective, we just drifted apart, but I don't know, maybe in their mind, we had a falling out! I also really wondered about the topic of neurodivergence, which I think also never came up in the book.

I also wondered if Lorraine is supposed to be some future version of Barbara if she doesn't change, or just a device to show Barbara's changing attitude. I found some of the exploration of (actual?) old age a bit interesting but much more shallow (understandably, as they aren't the focus).
But balancing that out, I thought the descriptions of hospice were fantastic, and I think my favorite part of the book was Barbara's reflections on watching the death of the very old compared to those of her mother and her sister: "Mom and Joanne had both died relatively young (sixty-three and thirty-nine) and comparatively quickly (within six and eighteen months from diagnosis); ... They were both asleep pretty much all the time right before they died, too, but death hadn’t had as much time to work on them, in either case. It had worked on Deborah more deliberately, more evenly; it had bored through Joanne like a lathe."

Maybe the part I found most haunting about this book, but least dwelled upon, was the narrator's relationship with her son. She didn't seem to care about it much, nor very much about her relationship with her (young) grandchild, and this seemed kind of odd to me. I mean, she DOES care, and maybe I'm overly sold on the societal idea that the most important thing to grandparents is their grandkids. I thought it was interesting how she tried to relate to him in a way that I rarely see depicted in fiction. I also don't remember if this book ever really talks about therapy for anyone or if the solution is just these little prayers.

I was also happy to spent time with Barbara without trying to solve her problems, but kind of late in the book, it did occur to me that she just... has very few interests. I mean she likes furniture, and food/cookbooks, and the book is about how she wants to make friends. But does she read a book (for herself, not to someone in hospice), see a movie she's interested in (I think there's just mention of a dull one with someone), go to an exhibit... anything? I mean, no one has to do any of those things, but when she does start hanging out with Lorraine's dog, it did almost make me want for her to have her own pet?

Also I know book synopses are notoriously horrible, but this one has got to be one of the worst. The FIRST WORD describes the narrator as "Sixtysomething" and, while I wouldn't QUITE describe it as a major plot point, the character's age is definitely highlighted multiple times as, in fact, not being 60 something, but rather 58.
Also to say "The turning point of her predicament comes from Barbara’s choice, in friends, between (too-young) Caitlyn and the (unsuitable) Other Barbara. Will she repeat the exciting mistakes of the past, or will she try a new kind of mistake for a change?" is just peculiar to me. Does this book even have a turning point? Can a friend be "too young"? (I think the book actually has some interesting things to say about this - and I would have liked more discussion on this point - but what a silly idea).
This synopsis would have gotten me as being one of the many, MANY books that says it's for fans of Elif Batuman, and actually it made me add The Old Place to my tbr, which we'll see how that goes. But IS this for fans of Elif Batuman? I'm not so sure. I bet there's an overlap but I don't think this venn diagram is a circle.

I did wonder about some of the soothsaying (for me):
"I do not get hundreds of emails a day. I used to, fifteen years ago, and at the time I found it difficult to manage, but now I get almost no emails a day, and that’s worse."

"People sometimes complain that it’s hard to make friends once you’re out of your twenties, but in my experience, the real trouble doesn’t come until the tail end of your forties,"

Lest I'm being too hard on this book overall, let me say there are plenty of funny lines too: "the strongest emotion you ordinarily encounter at an Episcopal church is mild wealth"

[Rosi Colmenares · Rating 2 out of 5]

Genre: Contemporary Adult Fiction

For fans of:
Female friendships
Food-centered storytelling
Easy, short read

I won this in a Goodreads giveaway—thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

This was definitely out of my comfort zone (trying new genres this year), and while it didn’t work for me, I can see the appeal for others.

The story follows Barbara after her best friend “breaks up” with her, and it’s mostly about her navigating loneliness and reflecting on her past relationships. I liked the idea, but I struggled with Barbara as a character—she came off very negative and hard to connect with.

There were also a few comments about the queer community that didn’t sit right with me, especially the idea that women can’t be friends with lesbians. That really threw me off.

Overall, I wanted more character growth and development, but it felt pretty minimal.

I’m a little sad this one didn’t land for me, but I’m still glad I tried something different.

[Alicia Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like, a 3.25.

I wanted to love this book.

Remember how I've said my book reviews aren't really about the books? Lol. Begin tangent:

I went to college with Daniel, though I doubt he remembers me. We went to an evangelical undergrad, though neither of us is particularly religious anymore. We had honors philosophy together my sophomore year, his freshman year. I was not in the honors program, but only because they scared me out of it because I was poor as shit and had to work so much I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up with the additional work load. But this particular class had a fantastic professor with a kick-ass name -- Rico Vitz! -- and fit well in my schedule, and my bestie was also in it, so I took it. Daniel was so smart he made me feel stupid in class. Not in like an asshole way, just in like a what-am-*I*-doing-here way. It was a challenging class. My first B in college, I think. Anyway, Daniel's dad is somewhat famous in evangelical circles, so I always remembered him. A few years after graduation, I became really good friends with Jessica, who'd gone to undergrad with us and had been good friends (maybe roommates? Idk, it was a long time ago) with Daniel in college, though I hadn't known Jess in college. Through Jess I learned that Daniel was making a name for himself as a columnist/writer, disowned his parents, deconstructed from evangelicalism, and transitioned. Good for him!

So anyway, I was excited to see this book as an option for the Goodreads challenge this month. And I really wanted to love it.

It was incredibly well written. Obviously well researched. Barbara is such a well fleshed-out character, believable, and Jesus H. Christ annoying as fuck. I couldn't stand her! She complains so damn much! Which, of course, is intentional. But I did not enjoy reading the book. I can hold that it was well written, I liked her character arc, still hated her character, did not enjoy reading it, but acknowledge that it was a great book and I am glad to have read it.


Favorite quotes:
(I listened to the audiobook, so apologies if punctuation is not exact to the written book, or if the wording is slightly off, I tried my best!)


First, you're the one who's young and the world is mostly full of people older than you. And then you blink, and everything is switched all at once.

I don't even mind being seated next to children on airplanes. They have to go places too, they belong in public just as much as anybody else does. After all, I had to be a child once too. I ought to be patient with those who have to be children now. Being a child is very difficult, and by way of compensating for their almost total impotence, they receive outsized powers of imagination, which makes tokens and gifts and things very useful indeed.

I don't like to guess what either of them would do or say if they were alive. It's important to me to not ventriloquize them, because once you get in the habit of consulting your idea of dead people, it's very easy to get in the habit to rewrite your memories of them with a construct of your own imagination... It's very clear to me that when people die, they are dead. Every death is permanent and irreversible.

Chaos is a policy choice.

I had to put in a little work to make sure that Gail did not corner me after services, since she had smelled human vulnerability on me and would now, unless carefully managed, ask me "How are you doing these days?" in a knowing sort of voice for the rest of my life, or hers.

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this book had a bit of an unfair disadvantage because I read this after reading Night Night Fawn: A Novel which is also a first person narrative from an opinionated older New Yorker named Barbara delivered as a stream of consciousness moving between past and present.

While there are a lot of similarities, these are obviously very different books, but I think having this comparison made what I didn’t enjoy about this book stand out more.

The Barbara in Meeting New People has a lot of strong opinions on everything from food to fashion and how we ought to behave socially. None of these opinions are especially objectionable and it gets quite tedious reading these long winded passages of her mild takes.

The story centers on her best friend dumping her. Barbara has always had a best friend, and the relationship always ends dramatically. We follow her as she reflects on these failures and attempts to forge new connections.

I think the blurb makes this seem like the story is about Barbara’s struggle to choose between two new friends but this doesn’t really match up with the experience of reading it. It’s much more focused on the impact of her friendship ending, her fear of loneliness, and her complicated feelings about getting older.

I think what I was missing from this was some clarity on why exactly Barbara’s relationships kept failing. It gestures towards her issue being her strong opinions and stubbornness, but as I said her opinions are pretty middle of the road and she’s open minded and happy to admit when she’s wrong. By comparison her failed relationships seem unreasonable and one sided with her being left without an explanation or chance to make things right. I thought maybe it would reveal Barbara to be an unreliable narrator which would have been really interesting, but it doesn’t end up going that way.

Instead of her developing as a character, she just learns to move forward and be open to new connections after facing rejection. That’s still a worthwhile story to explore, but it doesn’t feel as satisfying to read as if she had to confront her own shortcomings in a meaningful way.

I will also say if you’re looking for a queer story this might not be a great fit. Apart from the author being queer, the book itself doesn’t have queer characters (though Barbara does have opinions about lesbians!).

Overall this book is technically well written and Barbara as a character felt well developed, but I found it a bit lacking in substance.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the eARC.

[Ariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meeting New People follows a 58-year-old New Yorker named Barbara as she navigates the perils of aging and loneliness. It opens with the unexpected (to her) ending of her friendship with her ninth best friend (that is, the ninth person she considered her best friend throughout her life, not her ninth best-liked—perhaps the loss shouldn't feel so unexpected after losing eight others). The book takes us through about a week of Barbara's life as she resolves to make a new best friend, and then that resolve slowly morphs into becoming a better person. She interacts with coworkers, churchgoers, and her son with whom she also has a troubled (though less easily ended) relationship.

Barbara is mildly unpleasant for most of the book though rarely outright objectionable in her frequent opinionated ramblings. The character will be familiar to fans of Daniel M. Lavery, who has long written about mildly unpleasant people with relatable problems. I wasn't enjoying it too much in the beginning, but it's a short, quickly paced book and Barbara does grow throughout it so she never overstays her welcome. By the end, I was rooting for her.

I picked up this book based on it being listed as an LGBTQIA+ read, but besides one sequence on lesbians (some great people but probably not suitable for a best friend) there's no LGBTQIA+ characters or themes in the book. I suspect it was listed that way on the basis of the author's identity, which feels unfortunately simplistic. Queer people can obviously write non-queer books, and that's what Lavery has done here (unless one believes all friendships between women are inherently queer).

I read most of this book but was lucky enough to get the audiobook towards the end of my reading. The conversational tone of the prose makes this one a natural for an audiobook, and the narrator has a good voice for Barbara. She emotes well, and at times that made me more sympathetic to Barbara than I suspect I would have felt while reading. The one issue I had with the audiobook was that the narrator doesn't do very distinct voices for other characters, so dialogue (which Lavery is so good at!) was sometimes hard to follow, though as there are only short conversations with one other person throughout the book, this wouldn't be a huge problem.

Overall, I would recommend this book for readers comfortable with smaller, slice-of-life stories and an interest in aging, especially as a middle-to-elder woman. I appreciate NetGalley and HarperVia for the opportunity to not just read but listen to this via eARC and ALC.

[Nick Artrip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I requested and received an eARC of Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery via NetGalley. Fiftysomething, twice-divorced Barbara finds herself at a crossroads. She has lost yet another best friend. As she deals with the grief of another friendship destroyed, she looks back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life in hopes of figuring out how to go about making a better selection for her tenth, and hopefully last, best friend. Her opinions may be off-putting, and she may express herself in ways that others don't enjoy, but she also doesn't shy away when she's at fault. Her predicament comes to a head when she is presented with a choice between two potential best friends: will it be the too-young Caitlyn or the unsuitable Other Barbara?

In Meeting New People, Lavery crafts a character that is completely unforgettable. Barbara is many things: she's repulsive, she's opinionated, she's sympathetic, she's deeply human, she's flawed, she's hilarious. There were moments when I absolutely couldn't stand her, but they were equally met with moments when I could barely suppress the laughter caused by one of her wry observations. Barbara is able to recognize when she's at fault, but she also possesses a unique talent for conjuring up all the reasons she wasn't really at fault in the first place. She's a very particular, slightly cruel, and exacting narrator who is endlessly fascinating to spend time with, despite somehow also wanting to find the nearest exit.

This is a novel that opens with the end of a friendship, but manages to unravel into so much more. It’s an astute character study that pushes us to consider the complexities of the friendships that we form, and how we hold space for accountability or avoid it altogether. Meeting New People also questions the fallible conveniences of our memories. What’s written on the page is interesting, but I was equally interested in all of the things that were left unsaid in Barbara’s recollections. The narrative makes her undesirable qualities quite apparent, but we never get to fully explore to see the moment of crises that lead to the destructions of her friendship and the constant anger that tempers all of her relationships. Barbara’s defense mechanisms, as constructed by Lavery, are brilliant in their ability to maintain a distance between the reader and her as a narrator, allowing us to nearly fully see her while preserving her vulnerable underbelly.

[Maxwell Dalton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you HarperCollins and NetGalley for the eARC.

I feel that the blurb for this book is a little bit of a misrepresentation. This is advertised as a book where the narrator, sixtysomething twice-divorced Barbara, "looks back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life, in hopes of figuring out how to optimize finding her tenth, and hopefully last, best friend." Reading this, one might expect a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of each of these nine best friendships, or at least a focused look at each, before exploring what personal flaws Barbara has discovered in herself with each of these lost friends, and setting out to find a tenth friend after addressing these flaws.

The provided book is far from this. Mainly, the presence of that driving force feels absent. Instead, we get an exhausting trip inside of Barbara's mind. It seems as though this was intended as a sort of stream-of-consciousness style a la Virgina Woolf, but instead just reads as individual moments stretched out to reach a word count. Really, it was as if Lavery had come up with twenty different ideas for conveying something in the book, and rather than doing the work of selecting one or two that best fit the narrative, just put them all in back to back, at the expense of a more pleasant, focused reading experience. Another annoying piece of filler came in the elaborate detail placed on food, leaving the impression at times that I was reading a cookbook rather than literary fiction.

Still, there were some good moments to be had here. Earlier on in the story, there is a better display of an eye for metaphor, with food seeming to represent friendship, Barbara's furniture representing comfort, etc. etc. But sadly this focus gets lost somewhere along the way.

Other good moments included the pot luck scene and the break-up with Susan (even if it was beaten to death), as well as the latter scenes with Lorraine. It's also a shame that the ending seemed so lackluster, as if the word count had been reached and so the story was left hanging.

All in all, a book with lots of potential that was doomed by a lack of focus and pounds of fluff.

[Larry H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara is in her fifties, and one of her best friends, Susan, has just surprised her by ending their friendship. This wasn’t a random argument—Susan had a list of things about Barbara that she found objectionable. This incident bothered Barbara more than anything.

“But there’s nothing in the world as immovable as a woman who’s finished with you. A woman who’s finished with you, not just mad at you but finished with you, might as well be dead or on the moon or living a thousand years ago because there’s no path a person can walk anymore between the two of you, not even a little one, no matter how wide the road was before.”

As Barbara reflects on the dissolution of her friendship with Susan, she realizes that she has had nine other best friendships in her life. All of them ended at one time or another, for one reason or another. But it makes her wonder if there’s some flaw in her personality that has caused these relationships to fall apart.

She starts thinking about how she’ll meet her next best friend—hopefully someone she can grow old with. It’s so difficult to make friends as adults, especially once you reach a certain age. She weighs the options—should she befriend a colleague, join a group or a church? And what should she do differently this time?

This is really a thought-provoking book. I’ve thought about the challenges of making new friends as an adult. Parts of this book are really funny, but my challenge is that the majority of the book is told as an inner monologue. I needed more interaction between the characters to move the plot forward.

Check out my best reads of 2025 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2025.html .

See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.

Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/getbookedwithlarry/.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Audio for the ALC of this audiobook!

Are there audiobooks you’ve chosen solely for the narrator?

Enter Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery, narrated by the incomparable Marcia Gay Harden. I think I read the summary? I don’t even remember, because when I saw her name, I instantly hit play.

Barbara is at another crossroads in her life. In her 60s and twice divorced, her best friend breaks up with her. A best friend. The most important relationship to Barbara. As she deals with her grief, she reflects on her nine previous best friends and where things went wrong with each. Faced with three potential new best friends and determined not to make mistakes this time, she might just find some joy in the unexpected.

This book has great character development and a solid arc. It’s the first person pov of Barbara, and we really get deep into all of her thoughts, feelings, and flaws. Through her eyes we also get to know the quirky people in her life, past and present.

This isn’t the type of book I’d pick up normally. I liked Women’s Hotel okay, but it wasn’t the typical book I love. However, I’m glad I gave this one a chance. What I loved most about it is the importance of friendship. As someone who has never centered romantic relationships in her life, I fully believe in the importance and power of friendships as the most meaningful relationships in our lives and decentering the romantic ones sometimes.

It was a pleasant listen. And I blew through it on my long commute to work, household chores, getting ready in the morning, and during my bedtime routine. It’s out in June, so if it sounds like something you’d be into, add it to your summer reading list.

[Imagen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers for the opportunity to read this ARC. I will say with some regret that I really did not like this one at all. It was definitely not for me. I enjoy a story from the perspective of someone older, but this one was just poorly done IMO. The MC just kept rambling on and on about the same things over and over again. And not only that, she kept going off topic with way too many details that felt entirely unnecessary. The random recipes throughout also was kinda weird. I get that she worked in a food setting and was really good at her job, but it felt like I was reading one of those pages you go to for a recipe and you have to read the person's life story as well. That's pretty much what this whole book felt like to me. So many run-on sentences as well that just drove me crazy. I wanted to quit so many time, but I kept reading hoping it would get better. I don't feel like the title matches this book for me either. It's more like the remembrance of old relationships and trying to better the ones she currently has rather than actually meeting anyone new. While I didn't enjoy this one, I did however find some of her thoughts to be relatable. "I hope love is happening to other people all the time, and I'm just the one who hasn't figured it out yet." "I want someone who thinks of me without being prompted, someone who always wants to tell me about her day, who would rather complain to me than anybody else." "I'd been so aware of being lonely that it felt like I was going to be physically ill." All three of these quotes are something I have definitely thought to myself before. I can't say I recommend this one, but maybe someone else will read it and love it.