Significant Others

A Novel

By: Zoë Eisenberg

Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg, Jennifer Robideau

Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

"I've been searching for a book with female friendships at the heart of it that doesn't feel flippant or melodramatic and I've found it!" —Jennette McCurdy

Two women test how much weight their friendship can hold in this poignant and tender novel.

Roommates since college, Jess and Ren have built a strong—if at times codependent—friendship. Now navigating their late thirties, the women co-own a weathered beachfront home, comother a rescued shelter pup and have inadvertently centered their lives around each other.

Jess is clever and driven with a lucrative career running her own real estate brokerage. Magnetic but aimless, Ren has been making margaritas at the same local dive and teaching dance classes at the same run-down gym for well over a decade. After a one-night stand with a tourist leads to pregnancy, Ren realizes motherhood may be the change she’s been waiting for, and the friends make a plan to raise the child together.

Ren is excitedly pushing toward her due date when the baby’s father resurfaces, forcing Jess to face the foreboding notion that for the first time in eighteen years, they may not want the same thing.

In this stunning debut spanning nine pivotal months in the lives of two very different women, Zoë Eisenberg examines female friendship with emotional precision and offers an intimate look at who we belong to—and why.

©2024 Zoë Eisenberg (P)2024 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited

Fantastic Depiction of Female Friendship in Hawaii

“I’d always liked being the best thing that happened to someone’s evening.”

Significant Others is a fantastic novel written from the perspectives of two young women sharing a moment in each others’ lives before, during and after a key event. Eisenberg’s writing is grounded and natural, with a lyrical quality that captures wonderful human details and observations with a subtle poetic flair. Descriptions of characters jump off the page with the conversational ease of a friend recounting a recent experience, but with a specificity that develops the world and the psychology of the characters within it. Lines pop out that are evocative and funny: “You looked at her body and imagined it wet”; “Smelling of reef-safe sunscreen”; “Her hands two lively birds at the ends of her wrists”; and, disparagingly, “She probably bought her own health insurance, too.”

Eisenberg is able to define her competing protagonists through their thinking and inner logic, but also through their relationships to each other, the contradictions between their desires and their actions, and the way they elevate and rationalize certain choices both to themselves and the characters around them. Eisenberg’s ability to genuinely create both of these personas through dueling first-person narration is superb, and she authentically navigates the conflicts enveloping the women while developing them as distinct individuals over the course of the story.

The friendship Jess and Ren share is the heart of this story, and it’s refreshing to see female friendship explored on the page in a way that examines human flaws with protagonists who are not always totally likable, but are allowed to be selfish, conflicted, and human at times when other writers would be looking to keep things neat. It’s impressive on Eisenberg’s behalf to have flawed characters resonate so well, and at times you find yourself rooting for one over the other, or vice versa, and not because you want either Jess or Ren to succeed and the other to fail, but because at that place in the story you genuinely empathize with that particular character and her thought process. Friendship is messy! Young adulthood is messy! Art should be messy!

There are descriptions in here, usually of men in the book, that I had to write down because the framing was simultaneously simple and removed, yet sublimely poetic, indicative of a way the protagonist views the world. “He put his tongue inside my mouth outside of his Prius”; “As if his accomplishments were more embarrassing than his sandals”; and “Ignoring the bacterial tang of his breath, thinking of how there should have been a pineapple poster up there” during a make-out scene. These moments are funny, relatable, and succinct, and serve as a good window into the mind of the narrator for each of these passages. Another one, “As if I could get pregnant by taking a turn too fast on 130” made me laugh out loud.

A brutal line that resonates with me well after finishing the novel seems to sum up an underlying tension between the protagonist friends: “When it was over I realized I liked the way she liked me more than I liked her.” Woof. Who hasn’t felt this way at some point, or felt like they were on the opposite side of that sentiment? It’s such a simple, resonant way to describe power imbalances in relationships, expectations we hold for others in a relationship, and the realization after-the-fact of one’s own selfishness in the human desire to feel wanted and loved.

I walked away from Significant Others with an appreciation for Eisenberg’s ability to tell a story naturally, with real-life stakes but no inflated or inauthentic conflict. The novel is a beautiful foray into young adult female friendship, and it does its readers and characters justice by finding poetry and beauty in the interactions we have with those we love, those we want to love us, and those who we hurt and disregard in the process of figuring out what makes us “complete.”

Surprisingly poignant friendships

Really really impressed with how heartbreaking and beautiful this book was. Felt like I knew these people and their successes and mistakes were mine to partake in as well as theirs.
Look forward to reading more by Zoe.