Starlight Book Review – Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers

Cover of Modern Lovers by Emma Straub centered on a medium light red-orange background with Starry Night Elf avatar in lower right hand corner | Cover Image Source: Goodreads

Back in the Day Stellar Reading Challenge – 2010s

Published 2016

Trigger Warnings – Smoking/ Drinking/ Death and Suicide/ Sexual Content

3.75/5 When I planned for my reading for the 2010s in the Back in the Day Stellar Reading Challenge (SRC), my original choice ultimately did not meet this SRC’s criteria. Click here for details on this SRC. As 2022 neared its end, I considered myself fortunate that my book club chose to read Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers, a book published in 2016.

* I read Modern Lovers prior to the hubbub with author Straub and a Houston area school district. Any comments on this event with Straub will not be posted.

“Friends and former college bandmates Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe have watched one another marry, buy real estate, and start businesses and families, all while trying to hold on to the identities of their youth. But nothing ages them like having to suddenly pass the torch (of sexuality, independence, and the ineffable alchemy of cool) to their own offspring… Back in the band’s heyday, Elizabeth put on a snarl over her Midwestern smile, Andrew let his unwashed hair grow past his chin, and Zoe was the lesbian all the straight women wanted to sleep with. Now nearing fifty, they all live within shouting distance in the same neighborhood deep in gentrified Brooklyn, and the trappings of the adult world seem to have arrived with ease. But the summer that their children reach maturity (and start sleeping together), the fabric of the adults’ lives suddenly begins to unravel, and the secrets and revelations that are finally let loose—about themselves, and about the famous fourth band member who soared and fell without them—can never be reclaimed… Straub packs wisdom and insight and humor together in a satisfying book about neighbors and nosiness, ambition and pleasure, the excitement of youth, the shock of middle age, and the fact that our passions—be they food, or friendship, or music—never go away, they just evolve and grow along with us.”

Modern Lovers seemed a great choice for the Back in the Day SRC. Straub wrote a book about characters looking both back in the past and forward to the future. At moments in my reading, I wondered how Straub managed to write a book on the precipice of time. The characters, Andrew in particular, irritated me. Sometimes, I didn’t care much about anyone in the book and that’s reflected in my rating. I would probably pick up another Straub book but there are other authors I want to read first.

Quotes come from book flaps/cover and are featured on color blocks.