unpopular opinion: reunions are fun!

i love a good reunion book--but I also love a reunion. my friends don't. Why?

So, to start off, I read the BEST rom-com about a high school reunion situation last year. It wasn’t out yet, so I waited to share.

Then I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I resorted to Google. The following string of search terms got me there:

romance book reunion bet divorce lawyer writer best friends he believes in love she does not every year

More on that in a couple paragraphs. First—I’m off to my law school reunion this weekend! And I’m delighted. I LIKE reunions. I’d go to my high school reunions if any of my friends would go, even if I was a total nerd in a school and at a time when that was not a good thing and nerds did not yet rule the world and mean girls actually did look at your outfit with scorn and say things and… yeah. But I would still go! (Nerd cred check: I lettered in Forensics. For charades competitions. BEAT THAT.)

I wouldn’t go to my college reunion, because it was a huge college and due to poor choices on my part I emerged with only a couple of friends and a string of ex-boyfriends, and I don’t want to reunite with any of them (in spite of absolutely loving a good second chance romance, I’m happy with my first choice).

But law school! Law school was small and I like/liked nearly everyone who was in my class. I like parties of a specific kind, where there are a lot of people you know tangentially or have something in common with, so that it’s easy to strike up a conversation. I like seeing how people evolve and change, and in this context I think it’s easy to have a good conversation—one that goes a little deeper and involves real connection, and I’ve found over the years at this reunion and the high school ones I attended that the best conversations not usually with someone I was close to at the time. Maybe they work for the same reason that second chance romance does, in books and real life—when people have some history, it’s easier to find points of connection that launch conversations and beyond.

That said, most of my actual friends from law school—the people who were at or in my wedding, my roommates, etc—aren’t coming. For some the timing is bad (anyone with a kid knows May is often chock-full). And of course it takes money and time to travel to a reunion. But there’s a level of resistance to reunions that’s beyond that—the idea that people are there to show off their achievements, or to judge one another. And that’s certainly a theme in books that feature reunions. There’s always a character who doesn’t want to go see “all those awful people” and another who’s tugging them along. Meanwhile, our imaginary reunion-resister is worried about everything but often it comes down to not being who past-them expected they would be by now.

So, in the book about my reunion, I’d be the secondary character—the cheerful one who doesn’t see what the big deal is. Let’s see if I fit the cliches: I could be successful-by-standard-measures (career, family, appearance). It’s true, that’s me—and I found the reunion right after I’d lost my job to be a lot harder to attend, so check. I could also just not care that much what people think of me, a fun character trait in a book bestie that isn’t as true of me as I wish it was. And finally, I could be willing to look back on the good and bad of my classmates and see that we were all young and probably everyone felt out-of-place and was just trying to figure things out and therefore even people who seemed a bit awful at the time had their reasons—that’s usually the secondary character who ends up helping the MC see some things. That one is true of me, too.

I think it’s easier to attend a reunion when you’re good with who and where you are—no matter what that looks like. If you’re not quite there, it’s asking more, and maybe too much of yourself, to go look that in the face. Even if you go, the reunion represents more than the sum of its parts because the internal journey is a lot more than just planes, trains and automobiles.

Maybe we can see the reunion not attended, in some cases, as the “inciting incident” rejected. In the beginning of every book there’s a moment where the MC has to leave ye olde comfort zone so that things can happen inside and out. If they don’t go, there’s no book. I’m sure most of my old friends can’t go, or just don’t want to. But the writer in me can’t help but poke around and consider the idea that there is sometimes more at stake.

I have a book in my #tbr stack called Main Character Energy (haven’t started it yet, I’m reading Never Fall for Your Fiance, thoughts soon). But here’s a maybe startling thought: I’m not sure I want Main Character Energy right now. It’s nice to see a reunion as nothing more than a chance to catch up on some humans you knew in their younger form and talk about how we all change. And it’s certainly better not to be dying like the MC of The Celebrants which I mention below (except in the sense that we all are), so I’ll take that.

I went pretty far afield from my original goal of telling you about a book! Ok, so if you’re in a reunion mood at all, no matter where you fall on the scale, grab Just Some Stupid Love Story by Katelyn Doyle.

TOTAL DIGRESSION ALERT**Note---the US book—and therefore the Bookshop.org link—is hardback. It kinda looks like you can buy a paperback from the UK publisher on Amazon… I don’t like the cover (right) as well, but $18 is $18, and if I were you I think I’d go that route. I WANT to support the author and the US publisher. And lord knows my own agent is ALWAYS wanting my books to be hardback first then paperback, instead of being able to buy whichever you prefer which is how they’ve been published, bc reasons (more $4 for the publisher, happier publisher, maybe they market it harder, NPR and the NYT aren’t gonna be highlighting any paperback-first books anytime soon because snob and a whole host of other things that are of very little interest to us as readers).

But STILL. Paperbacks are cheaper and lighter and easier to read on the beach and in bed and on airplanes and personally I prefer them as a reader even though as an author I know if my books were hardback first it would indicate that I had “arrived”. (See also: Emily Henry, whose first two books were paperback first and whose most recent one is, annoyingly, only available in hardback).**

Ok, we’re back. As you’ll have guessed from my search terms, Just Some Stupid Love Story is about a screenwriter and a divorce lawyer who were in love in high school, all the way in love, gloriously in love, until a metaphorical bomb dropped on them and they broke apart. Now they’re back at a reunion and they make a bet on five couples—which ones will be together at the next reunion and which won’t. And one of them—the one who believes in love—outright bets on them. We follow them for five years of missed connections and changes and emails and meet-ups and it’s wonderful. If you liked the format of Romantic Comedy (Curtis Sittenfeld) it’s got that vibe. I loved it. The slightly bad news is that it’s not out until the beginning of June but just go ahead. Pre-order it. Your future self will be so EXCITED to have it to take on a summer vacation or read while ignoring the kids at the pool. (I mean, kids who are old enough. Or in a swim lesson. You know what I mean.)

A few other reunion-adjacent reads:

In Her Boots, yours truly This one isn’t directly about a reunion. But it is about the reunion of two old friends, one who wants MC Energy and the other who has had MC Energy thrust upon her. So they swap places. It’s not a great idea but it does make for a fun book, because MC Energy isn’t a thing you can escape. If you want to save your family farm, force your mother to finally see you as an adult and re-connect with your first love you have to show up as yourself—which of course demands that you figure out who that is first.

Wreck the Halls, Tessa Bailey—a glorious attempt by their kids to get a band (or rather, a duo) back together who do not wish to reunite. I loved this for many many reasons, but the fun and games around the will-they/won’t they reunion were fantastic and I wanted more. (Steamy.) (Holiday themed but you won’t notice.)

Hex Education, Maureen Kilmer I think this wasn’t exactly a reunion? And yet it was, as three women whose college attempt at witchcraft backfired (injuring a classmate and burning down a building) reunite on campus and disagree strongly about whether getting the coven back together could mean great things for them all, or could burn it all down all over again.

The Celebrants, Steven Rowley Not gonna lie, I bought this with great excitement, because I loved The Guncle and The Editor, and then put it down five pages in when I discovered that the five friends who have reunited regularly after various disasters in their lives—”living funerals” they called them—were coming together this time so one of them could announce… his actual impending death from cancer. Honestly I bet it’s really good, but I can’t let anything that involves the plot “the cancer is back and this time it’s going to kill you” into my head. (Once, a friend asked me to blurb her book and I was all yes! I loved the last one! Send it! Unless it’s “the cancer is back and this time it’s going to kill you”! and she wrote back and said, um… it actually follows a woman whose cancer already killed her who is narrating her family’s first summer after her death. So that’s why you won’t see my name on the back of On Fire Island. Which, again, I bet is really good.)

Yowsers. That’s it from me this week. Got any reunion book recs? Bring ‘em on!