Hey Ladies!: The Story of Eight Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails

Hey Ladies!: The Story of Eight Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails

By: Michelle Markowitz & Caroline Moss

Hey Ladies! is a laugh-out-loud read that follows a fictitious but all too familiar group of eight 20-and-30-something female friends for one year of their lives  Told through a series of email chains, text messages, and illustrations, this book takes you along for the roller coaster ride of holiday celebrations, book clubs, summer house rentals, wedding showers, Instagram stalking, brunches, breakups, and, of course, all the inside jokes and harsh truths that only best friends share.

I think this book was supposed to be funny, but it just made me sad.  Maybe I'm too close.  Maybe we're intended to just laugh at how ridiculous and over the top (OTT!) everything is, but the authors have intermittently spaced actual thoughtful conversations at various points throughout, so by the final month, when Gracie calls Ali and Jen out on making every single thing about them and the wedding, including her own birthday, all I felt was horrible that (1) everyone then turned on Gracie and (2) that Gracie didn't burn the wedding to the ground. The final email from Gracie celebrating her own engagement with these shitheels did not give me a "Haha, here we go again!" zany laugh, but the feeling of watching an abused person return to their abuser.  As I said, maybe I'm too close.

The book is a breezy and quick read, with a cute design. It's a modern day epistolary novel, using email chains, texts and some graphic pictures.  We're dealing with eight women in their late twenties.  Although it seems like a lot to keep track of, most of the women are paper thin caricatures and the bulk of the messages are between just four of them: Jen, the bride-to-be, Ali, the type-A Maid of Honor who constantly books things and asks for reimbursement, Katie, the one who keeps hanging after this shitty guy who pukes on one of them during a weekend in Portugal, and Morgan, who has no real characteristics except to be "the voice of reason" every so often when Jen, Ali and Katie are becoming extremely unlikeable again.  That happens frequently throughout, as each of them are completely self-absorbed.   

The other four are: Nicole, whose storyline basically just involves her trying to make the bridesmaid dresses and then going bankrupt, Caitlin, who is a lifestyle/diet/yoga guru who sends thinly veiled marketing emails, Ashley, who is in Connecticut and never has service, and the aforementioned Gracie, who lives in Brooklyn and has a separate life and therefore does not participate in the shenanigans.

 I think there's plenty of comic relief in the idea, but the execution left me with a bad taste in my mouth.  Partly is the unlikeability of most of the "main" characters combined with the shitty way they treat the few likeable people in the book.  Second is the limitations the format has on the action: we get the lead up and the planning each time, but almost never hear anything about how the actual party/night out/bachelorette weekend/friendervention actually went, except for one or two details or comments.  What that does is create the feeling that the friendship consists entirely of crappy emails, and not of any actual fun.  It leaves you struggling to answer the question of why these people are even friends at all, and maybe that's a point the book is trying to make, but it's not one you can really hit hard while you're also trying for laughs.  The last two pages make that very clear.  

I will definitely cop to being part of a group chain of six friends from school, but it just makes the question of why the ladies in Hey Ladies are so awful even more glaring.  There's plenty of comedy to mine without backing into clownishness. And parts of it were funny!  But it felt like they were using a hammer for the comedy - it wasn't enough to make the joke, we have to drive it into the ground - and in the process, really reiterate again and again that I could be reading House of Leaves for this prompt instead and I'd probably be less grossed out.   Much as I wanted to like this book, it just wasn't for me.  Send it off to someone who will appreciate it!  Send it to someone who can treat it right; I'm sure there's plenty of readers out there who'll love it.

46: A Book With No Chapters/Unusual Chapter Headings/Unconventionally Numbered Chapters