I'm So Happy for You by Lucinda Rosenfeld

From the Publisher

What if your best friend, whom you've always counted on to flounder in life and love (making your own modest accomplishments look not so bad), suddenly starts to surpass you in every way?

Wendy's best friend, Daphne, has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. If Daphne veers from suicidal to madly in love, Wendy offers encouragement. But when Daphne is suddenly engaged, pregnant, and decorating a fabulous town house in no time at all, Wendy is...not so happy for her. Caught between wanting to be the best friend she prides herself on being and crippling jealousy of flighty Daphne, Wendy takes things to the extreme, waging a full-scale attack on her best friend-all the while wearing her best, I'm-so-happy-for-you smile-and ends up in way over her head.

Rosenfeld has a knack for exposing the not-always-pretty side of being best friends—in writing that is glittering and diamond-sharp. I'M SO HAPPY FOR YOU is a smart, darkly humorous, and uncannily dead-on novel about female friendship.

The New York Times - Laurie Winer

Rosenfeld goes beyond the obvious issues of envy and the perils of vicariousness to examine a fascinating byproduct of feminine empathy: the very skills that make women so good at intimacy, the reassurances and supportive phrases that girlfriends offer reflexively, help them avoid confrontation and form a surface over everyday wounds. Small resentments collect until one day, perhaps because of a trivial crime, they explode in a Wagnerian burst of emotion. Rosenfeld builds a sturdy plot complete with a red herring and a climax that, while convenient to her heroine's redemption, is not resolved in an easy or sentimental way…I'm So Happy for You may not transcend its genre, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable and somewhat rare specimen of chick lit that stays focused on the chicks.

Publishers Weekly

Rosenfeld (What She Saw) delves into the thornier side of female friendship in this hip take on modern womanhood. Wendy and Daphne have been best friends forever, but their relationship, sketched out in e-mails that cascade from their group of girlfriends, comes to a breaking point when Daphne suddenly pulls herself together, stops fooling around with a married man and finds a new love interest who happens to be handsome, rich and obnoxious. In quick succession, Daphne ties the knot, moves into a brownstone and gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Wendy, a low-paid editorial drone who's been trying and failing to conceive with her slacker husband, feels that her own life is thrown into miserable relief. She begins to lash out at Daphne, first passively, and then rather aggressively. In the course of a few twists, misunderstandings and revealed secrets, Wendy questions whether the source of her inferiority complex is Daphne or herself. The two friends are by turns frustrating and sympathetic, while Rosenfeld takes a dark, hilarious and painfully accurate view of the less-than-pure reasons why women stay friends. (July)

Kirkus Reviews

Rosenfeld (Why She Went Home, 2004, etc.) subversively suggests that best-friendship is as complicated and co-dependent as the average romance. Wendy is solid, responsible, gainfully employed, attractive and married. Daphne is erratic, emotional, beautiful and spoiled. Since they bonded in college 15 years ago, their relationship has chartered a steady course: Daphne provides the excitement; Wendy is the clean-up crew. But suddenly things have shifted. Daphne has finally left the older, married Mitch (cause of many late-night, suicide-threatening phone calls to Wendy) and clicked with hotshot lawyer Jonathan. This coincides with Wendy's marriage sinking into bored annoyance; fixated on her failure to conceive, she has turned husband Adam into little more than a sperm donor. After their lovely wedding, Jonathan and Daphne find a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone to renovate, just as Wendy and Adam are evicted and have to move into an even dingier apartment than the one they are leaving. Then Daphne gets pregnant, just like that! It's really more than Wendy can bear. Smugly happy with the relationship when her friend was needy, she's ashamed to realize that she doesn't much like the less-dysfunctional Daphne. Her reaction to good fortune reveals to Wendy how petty she is; readers are likely to agree, and her unpleasantness is a problem. Implying that such power plays lie at the heart of female friendships (other peripheral pals are also skewered and roasted), Rosenfeld isn't quite trenchant enough in her observations for the novel to be as unnerving as she intends. A black comedy that could have been sharper and funnier. Agent: Maria Massie/Lippincott Massie McQuilkin

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