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To My Dearest Friends
Alice and Nanny have never met before, but they have one thing in common: their late friend Roberta. Alice is the prim proprietor of a chic Madison Avenue shop, while Nanny is a sharp-eyed Manhattan real-estate broker. This New York odd couple is thrown together when Roberta trusts them with her last request—that together they open her safe-deposit box. What they find inside compels these women to address a surprising truth about their beloved Roberta. A profound yet hilarious novel, To My Dearest Friends is the story of two women and a journey of friendship neither chose to take.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
187 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
5 people are currently reading
242 people want to read
About the author
Patricia Volk
9 books19 followersPatricia Volk is the author of the memoir Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family and four works of fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Bennington College, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Playboy. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
March 5, 2009
This book was a literary mess. From a disfunctional plot line to confusing dialogue and irrelevant tangents, it was barely readable. Do not be fooled by the synopsis! The book is incapable of living up it's description.
March 17, 2017
I was entertained by this episodic tale. The writing conveys the different characters of the various narrators. Not much of a plot but the dialog, descriptions, and writing are crisp and entertaining.
March 15, 2015
2.5 raised up to 3 because I liked the beginning.
Maybe because I read this piecemeal, this felt choppy and disjointed. Sometimes I just need to get a big chunk of time to read.
Maybe because I read this piecemeal, this felt choppy and disjointed. Sometimes I just need to get a big chunk of time to read.
January 24, 2008
This was a fresh look at a familiar theme, woman friends and their special connection. Alice and Nanny are quite dissimilar but they share a mutual friend, Roberta, who has just died of breast cancer. The surviving friends seem to have been the companions to complement the disparate sides of Roberta's personality. At the end their is an unexpected third character who reflected yet another, more hidden, side.
The portrayal of daily life in Manhattan is so vivid I began to consider NYC as a character rather than a setting.
Volk treats her characters, even the late Roberta with a light respectful hand. They have foibles but they are not set up to ridicule. She understands how very powerful the bonds of friendship are to women and how fragile our lives seem. One character is so fearful of the threat of breast cancer that she confides that she regards the breasts she once thought beautiful and sexy as ticking time bombs ready to go off. and so her new friend accompanies her to her mammography appointment.That seemed so poignant considering how their old friend left them, and so fitting.
The portrayal of daily life in Manhattan is so vivid I began to consider NYC as a character rather than a setting.
Volk treats her characters, even the late Roberta with a light respectful hand. They have foibles but they are not set up to ridicule. She understands how very powerful the bonds of friendship are to women and how fragile our lives seem. One character is so fearful of the threat of breast cancer that she confides that she regards the breasts she once thought beautiful and sexy as ticking time bombs ready to go off. and so her new friend accompanies her to her mammography appointment.That seemed so poignant considering how their old friend left them, and so fitting.
June 4, 2007
I learned about this book from Head Butler and bought it while visiting a dear friend at her daughter's wedding in Denver.
Two weeks after Roberta "Bobbi" Bloom dies, her lawyer calls her two best friends, Alice and Nanny, to his office. Why? Because Bobbi has given them keys to a safety deposit box. And the lawyer now has a letter for them from Bobbi:
Dearest Nanny and Alice, Dear Dearest Friends in No Particular Order, Please go now to the Chase on Fifty-eighth and Madison. Open the box together. You'll know what to do. Love you to pieces.
But they don't know what to do and they don't like each other much and so this short, chatty but not insubstantial novel goes.
Don't read ahead and spoil the surprise...
Two weeks after Roberta "Bobbi" Bloom dies, her lawyer calls her two best friends, Alice and Nanny, to his office. Why? Because Bobbi has given them keys to a safety deposit box. And the lawyer now has a letter for them from Bobbi:
Dearest Nanny and Alice, Dear Dearest Friends in No Particular Order, Please go now to the Chase on Fifty-eighth and Madison. Open the box together. You'll know what to do. Love you to pieces.
But they don't know what to do and they don't like each other much and so this short, chatty but not insubstantial novel goes.
Don't read ahead and spoil the surprise...
January 16, 2009
A woman dies and in her will leaves something to two of her friends that have never met. The book has these two friends trying to figure out the intent of their dead friend in bringing the two of them together and why she left them what she did. It's definitely a discussion book when u get to the end as u need to see if others felt the same when they finished it. Volk's writing is wonderful.
May 17, 2009
This little book is a big surprise from start to finish. It presents unique friendships and relationships among women in their 60's and does it with humor and class. It is a unique mystery; not a "who-dun-it," but a bigger mystery. Do we ever really know our friends? And the more we know the more we like.
February 7, 2019
I really enjoyed this book. The main characters are close to my age and I could relate to their life experiences. I found it very believable. At first I was confused with the way the author shared the characters thoughts (in italics, I think) and current conversation in regular print, but once I figured it out, I thought it was very much true to how we think while other this are going on. At first I didn't like Alice, but she grew on me.
October 9, 2023
I so enjoyed this book, quickly engaged in the mystery presented early in the book. The characters felt like people you'd like to spend time with, and the dialogue seemed real. Bobbie must have been quite a gal. Great job on the book, Patricia Volk. Thanks for sharing this story with us.
August 31, 2017
I was a little confused at the beginning but finally figured it out. Ended well.
January 4, 2022
Wonderful
June 21, 2025
Love. Because I love regular people describing their thoughts on the seemingly mundane, the everyday experiences. If you like a fast pace it won’t be for you but I loved it. I cried and giggled.
August 21, 2024
Having a bit of a lucky streak. Lovely descriptions, writing style and a enjoyable story about friendship.
September 13, 2016
A fine quick read. I thought the characters were a little flat (or at least developed a little flatly if that makes sense), but I still enjoyed it.
March 26, 2009
A woman in her fifties dies and leaves a safe deposit box key to her two best friends (who don't know each other), with the instruction "You'll know what to do" about its contents. The box contains one passionate love letter to the woman, whose friends (and presumably her husband and daughter) had no idea of the affair. The woman's two friends, whose personalities and circumstances are as different from each other's as possible, try to figure out what their late friend would have wanted them to do, and why, and of course they disagree. Each saw only part of her, and they even called her by different variations of her name. As they work through the process, the book raises questions about the nature of friendship, love, and change. Though it's an interesting vehicle, the story seems a bit improbable to me; if the intent was for the friends to find the lover, why would she have wanted that? Yet the idea of relating in different ways to different people, showing different sides of onself, rings true.
March 5, 2013
Two very different women share a friend, who at her death shares a secret relationship by having both women—who never knew each other before— together open a safe deposit box that contains a letter. The rest of the book details the daily minutiae of Nanny and Alice as they cope with their own changing lives and puzzle over how to handle this Roberta/Robbie's suddenly shared secret. I just returned from a trip to New York, and I enjoyed traveling through a New York I will never know—the one New Yorkers live in is quite different from the one the occasional visitor sees.
This is a book about ageing women, whose children are gone. One is widowed, and one is not. One has an imperious, controlling mother, and a business inherited from that mother. How they deal with their loved ones, and with their situations is just as interesting as the "mystery" at the heart of the novel. Perhaps young women can not find the resonance of this story, but for women over 50, it is a charming read.
This is a book about ageing women, whose children are gone. One is widowed, and one is not. One has an imperious, controlling mother, and a business inherited from that mother. How they deal with their loved ones, and with their situations is just as interesting as the "mystery" at the heart of the novel. Perhaps young women can not find the resonance of this story, but for women over 50, it is a charming read.
September 25, 2011
A quick, enjoyable read about two separate friends of a recently deceased woman Roberta who are left her safe deposit box in her will. The book is a little scattered. It rotates narrators, which is fine, but the chapter headings don't typically denotes whose view it is. The book is mainly about the individual friendship each of the main characters, Nanny and Alice, had with the deceased. But it also speaks to the individual struggles each one has in life. The underlying "mystery" is why what is in Roberta's safe deposit box there and what the two friends are supposed to do with the information.
What was weird to me is that each was a long-time friend of Roberta's (one for 60ish years and one for 40ish years), but they don't really express a lot of grief for having lost such a close friend a few weeks prior. That seemed odd.
What was weird to me is that each was a long-time friend of Roberta's (one for 60ish years and one for 40ish years), but they don't really express a lot of grief for having lost such a close friend a few weeks prior. That seemed odd.
May 14, 2016
I loved the interaction of Roberta's friends - Alice and Nanny. When I think about my friendships, I know there are those who would ask -if I brought all my friends together - why or how I could be friends with someone who wasn't like them. The book describes Roberta through her friends who knew her at different times and ways in her life and theirs. The way it was written brought the action forward in small bites. It was a delightful read. I didn't want it to end, but there wasn't anymore to say, and in the end, Nanny and Alice are now friends. A situation arranged by Roberta after her death. Maybe there wasn't a great plot, but it was a good story about a woman who loved her friends - as different as each was.
June 19, 2008
Plot starter without any spoilers: a lady dies and as part of her will, gets two of her best friends together to solve a sort-of mystery. The two friends don't really know each other and they are almost total opposites. It's interesting to see an outside look at how the different kinds of friends you have serve you in different ways, but there was some excessive sub-character development and a few random tangents. I did enjoy it and it was a perfect way to amuse myself while sitting on a plane on a runway in the Atlanta airport for many, many hours. But I'm in a grouchy mood so maybe that's tainting this review...
September 9, 2008
I can't explain why I liked it. Not a great plot. Not great writing. I took 3 books and stacks of The New Yorker on vacation with me, and although the other books are very good, this is the one that I could not put-down once I started it. I did not like "Stuffed"-- Volks other book. (So much so that I did not even finish it.) But this took me less than 24 hrs to complete and I read it at the expense of tending to my 3yo and other important things. One could write about this book and be a big spoiler, which I won't, but if anyone I know reads this book, let me know what you thought of the "surprise." Eh. Is what I thought....
October 4, 2007
This book reads like a disjointed episode of Gilmore Girls, if the Gilmores were 50-year-old women. Volk provides us with a glimpse into the minds of older women with an insight that is, at its best, quite piercing. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of this reassuring and heartwarming novel was marred by its more saccharine, perplexing, coy, and platitudinous qualities. The overly clever inner monologues annoyed me to no end. And yet, inexplicably, TO MY DEAREST FRIENDS left me with a warm fuzzy feeling. Go figure.
October 4, 2008
A woman named Roberta dies of cancer and leaves a letter to her 2 best friends Alice & Nanny. Alice & Nanny never knew each other, but are brought together by their friends letter.
She leaves them a love letter that was written to her; what is shocking is that both alice and nanny believed that Roberta was happily married, and they never suspected she had an affair.
The story follows alice and nanny as they get to know each other and as they go through their own problems in their own lives.
She leaves them a love letter that was written to her; what is shocking is that both alice and nanny believed that Roberta was happily married, and they never suspected she had an affair.
The story follows alice and nanny as they get to know each other and as they go through their own problems in their own lives.
June 20, 2009
I give this book two stars only because I somewhat had the desire to skim through and find out how it ended, which I did not actually do. Otherwise, the book would have gotten one star. The storyline sounded interesting enough that I wanted to read the book, but less than one chapter in and I was losing interest, two chapters in and I was downright disinterested, but I kept on for one more chapter thinking maybe it was a slow starter. And maybe it was, but if so it was slow enough I couldn't bring myself to keep reading a book I was just not enjoying whatsoever.
April 29, 2013
Entertaining and the characters are quite good. I liked Nanny.
I don't feel a great deal of connection to the women in some ways as the lifestyle in New York seems pretentious and isolated at times. The idea of focusing on shops, theatre, movies not particuarly interesting, but it is handled well and the relationship that develops between Alice and Nanny is the high point, although I wish Alice had become warmer - somehow she never reads as approachable enough to like.
I think Volk is a good writer but I don't believe I'll read another one of her books.
I don't feel a great deal of connection to the women in some ways as the lifestyle in New York seems pretentious and isolated at times. The idea of focusing on shops, theatre, movies not particuarly interesting, but it is handled well and the relationship that develops between Alice and Nanny is the high point, although I wish Alice had become warmer - somehow she never reads as approachable enough to like.
I think Volk is a good writer but I don't believe I'll read another one of her books.
October 10, 2020
Boring, boring, so incredibly boring.
The book is oh so slow, and without any meaningful message. I remember only one scene, where one of the characters wants to sell her apartment and she is standing by the window, enumerating worthy moments of her life and how she should remember those for she is getting old and will be ill and will need those memories to give her strength. Obviously she is not happy with the choice she made about the apartment, but it was the reasonable thing to do.
I don't know, I really tried to like this book but it just .... No.
The book is oh so slow, and without any meaningful message. I remember only one scene, where one of the characters wants to sell her apartment and she is standing by the window, enumerating worthy moments of her life and how she should remember those for she is getting old and will be ill and will need those memories to give her strength. Obviously she is not happy with the choice she made about the apartment, but it was the reasonable thing to do.
I don't know, I really tried to like this book but it just .... No.
September 24, 2007
This book was... ok, to say the least. I knew going in that it would be a quick read - given it's not very thick. The story seemed rushed, and I story wasn't coming to a close (and I was almost done with the book - 1 to 2 chapters to go!) The story did end, on a good note but it was rushed and not that much thought seemed to go into the ending.
I most likely wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
I most likely wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
December 31, 2008
This was a book group read. I am curious to see if it had any interest for younger women, as it is about older women. A woman dies of cancer, and two of her friends are called to her attorney's office. They are given the key to a safe deposit box and instructions that they are to open it together. And what is inside? The contents of the safe deposit box drive much of the rest of the story. This is about lifelong Manhattan women.
January 19, 2009
I loved reading this book. It is so much more than just a story of friendship and "what would you do if...?" It is a story of women,fear of the unknown, friendship, life, growing old, sharing your life with others and aging gracefully (or not) with each other. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the changes in the characters relationships and lives as the moved through adulthood and into 'middle-age'. As a 50 something woman, I can relate!
March 23, 2011
This was a nice quick read about a woman who dies of cancer and leaves her two friends to ferret out answers to a couple clues she left in her safe deposit box. Somewhat predictable in that at first the two woman don't really like each other, but gradually grow on each other and in the end become good friends. Oh..they also find out the "mystery" of their deceased friend...that was not as predictable, which was good! Nice a light for a winter's weekend read.
October 11, 2013
When a dear friend dies and leaves a legacy to you and another dear friend, how do you solve the mystery that comes with the legacy? Should you accept what you learn, reject it, or act on it? Can you and your new partner in this mystery do anything? Lives and reputations could be at stake.
This story is probably the warmest I've read of friendships and the love between friends. It is witty in places, but always, always deeply connected to love. Guess what? I deeply loved it!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews