Text Me When You Get Home | Schaefer, Kayleen

Lange Beschreibung
Text Me has the thrills and laughs of a romantic comedy, but with an inverted message: There just isn't only one love story in our lives, Schaefer writes. If you re lucky, friends will be the protagonists in these multiple love stories. It s high time that we start seeing it that way. NPR.org

A personal and sociological examination and ultimately a celebration of the evolution of female friendship in pop culture and modern society

For too long, women have been told that we are terrible at being friends, that we can t help being cruel or competitive, or that we inevitably abandon each other for romantic partners. But we are rejecting those stereotypes and reclaiming the power of female friendship.
 
In Text Me When You Get Home, journalist Kayleen Schaefer interviews more than one hundred women about their BFFs, soulmates, girl gangs, and queens while tracing this cultural shift through the lens of pop culture. Our love for each other is reflected in Abbi and Ilana, Issa and Molly, #squadgoals, the acclaim of Girls Trip and Big Little Lies, and Galentine s Day.
 
Schaefer also includes her own history of grappling with a world that told her to rely on men before she realized that her true source of support came from a strong tribe of women. Her personal narrative and celebration of her own relationships weaves throughout the evolution of female friendship on-screen, a serious look at how women have come to value one another and our relationships.
 
Text Me When You Get Home is a validation that has never existed before. A thoughtful, heart-soaring, deeply reported look at how women are taking a stand for their friendships and not letting go.

Rezensierung
Praise for Text Me When You Get Home

A memoir of female friendship issues a call to action for BFFs everywhere. The New York Times Book Review

Text Me has the thrills and laughs of a romantic comedy, but with an inverted message: There just isn't only one love story in our lives, Schaefer writes. If you're lucky, friends will be the protagonists in these multiple love stories. It's high time that we start seeing it that way. NPR.org

Schaefer traces the evolution of female friendship in this thoughtfully reported book. Its insightful cultural criticism makes for an especially valuable read in the #MeToo era. Entertainment Weekly 

Uplifting. People
 
Text Me When You Get Home is journalist Kayleen Schaefer s love letter to her friends. Schaefer rejects the idea that women s friendships are rife with dysfunction and that women themselves are somehow dysfunctional, a concept that she shows remains strong in popular culture Schaefer shows that, contrary to pop culture s emphasis on catfights and frenemies, women s friendships are stabilizing and joyful. The Washington Post

[A] witty, deep memoir [that] digs into the power and the glory of female friendships...Where to start unpacking the good news that Kayleen Schaefer broadcasts in her timely, nimble, essential memoir...Every page of this book has something valuable to impart about the necessity of fostering female bonds and tending them with the same care we give to our relationships with family, spouses, and children. Elle

Reading Text Me When You Get Home feels like experiencing its subject the intimate, slow-burning, miraculously comfortable thrill of making and keeping a lifelong friend. Kayleen Schaefer s affectionate and clear-sighted exploration of female friendship is as romantic as a movie and as honest as the conversation on the third day of a road trip; reading it is as delightful as walking into a bar on a weeknight to see your friend already seated and ordering your drink. Jia Tolentino, staff writer at The New Yorker

Schaefer certainly puts friends first in Text Me When You Get Home, a love letter to the power of female friendships in a world that would rather believe women are catty. From the friendship stories of everyday women to the evolution of cultural representation of women s friendships, this uplifting book celebrates the friends who can be just as important (or more so) than our romantic partners. Parade.com

Illuminating and uplifting Text Me When You Get Home will remind you of what a good friendship is supposed to look like, and inspire you to nurture your relationships with the strong women around you. Bustle 

A hopeful celebration of women's friendships. Kirkus Reviews
 
The title speaks for itself: I constantly say those exact words to my friends when we part ways or to my sister when she goes out for a run alone...Schaefer s work is a great addition to this trend (and your bookshelf).   Outside Magazine 

Schaefer creates a beautiful portrait of how modern female friendship has evolved to be a positive force that is making women stronger than ever....She artfully explains how the intense bond we experience as friends carries us through many different eras of our lives and dispels the idea that female friends are less important than romantic relationships, family, or careers....You will find something in this book that will make you want to text your own person and tell her how much she means to you. Buzzfeed, Favorite Books of 2018

Text me when you get home. Those six words aren't just about getting home safely at the end of the night they're really a story about how special and fierce friendships are between women. NPR's Book Concierge 

[Schaefer s] book about the incredible, complicated bonds of female friendship is relatable, familiar, and subverts the false notion that women are predisposed to hating each other. Mental Floss

This is a really good summer read to make you appreciate your friends. So just pick up a copy and you can finish it at the pool in like, a day. Just try not to cry in public. The Betches

Text Me When You Get Home offers a new sociological perspective as well as a celebration of female friendships today. PopSugar

I went to an all-girls boarding school, so I thought I had a PhD in female friendship, but Text Me When You Get Home put me in my place. Town & Country, Editor's Pick

I was deeply moved by this book. I cried and I laughed. I recognized myself in it. I felt raised up and also challenged. It felt like a delicious, long overdue conversation with a best friend I didn t know I had. I will be giving this book to all my girlfriends. Lennon Parham, creator, writer and star of Best Friends Forever and Playing House
 
Warning: this absolutely delightful and insightful book on the immense power of female friendship will make you book a trip to visit your college best friend immediately. You might even buy Beyoncé tickets. It s that good. Jessica St. Clair, creator, writer and star of Best Friends Forever and Playing House

Here s a book to devour in two sittings....Readers of all generations will enjoy her engaging writing and may see their own friendships reflected in her stories. Booklist

Part social history, part personal narrative, Text Me When You Get Home is a Valentine to female friendship. ShelfAwareness

A refreshing read that really gets at the heart of why portrayals on Insecure, Broad City, and everything in-between so greatly resonate. Bitch Media

This in-depth look into the evolution of female friendship is one all women will benefit from this year. Working Mother

Buchausschnitt
Chapter 1

The Friendships That Shaped Our Own

As I've gotten older, I've understood more the importance of friendships, and so, I really make an effort to reach out and make play dates, not let too much time go by.

-Jane Fonda, actress, writer, political activist

In 1969, a year and a half after my parents married, my dad, who was a civil engineer in the Air Force, was sent to the war in Vietnam. My mom stayed by herself in an apartment near the military base in Omaha, Nebraska. She had a job teaching Spanish to high school students, so during the day she went to work and at night she came home and wrote my dad a letter. 'I made a promise that I would write every night,' she says. A couple she and my dad had been friendly with looked after her, taking her to the movies or out to dinner, but 'not weekly,' she is quick to add.

She didn't have any other friends, or want any, which is inconceivable to me. It's not that I know my mom as someone who surrounded herself with girlfriends. I don't. But I assumed that at this point in her life, in her mid-twenties, by herself, states away from her parents and siblings, she'd at least have looked to other women for companionship and commiseration. Weren't there other women on the base whose husbands were in Vietnam? But she didn't.

'I never even thought of it,' she says. 'I didn't desire it. I concentrated on my teaching and wrote your dad letters. This was my way to support the effort in Vietnam. I had to be tough, and withstand anything; I couldn't be sad, or unhappy. I was just busy.'

This is partly just my mom's personality. Being introspective, especially if that might turn into feeling depressed, is as unnatural to her as texting with her thumbs instead of her index fingers.

But her view on female friendships isn't unique among women of her generation. She's in her seventies now, and no longer feels like she has to soldier on being devoted only to her family. When she was a young wife and mother, she thought of friendships as an indulgence. They were nice, but not essential. What she was responsible for was taking care of her family, so she restrained herself from being interested in anything that would get in the way of that.

This was the contemporary view of how to live, at least if you were white and in the professional class, according to Judith E. Smith, a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 'Heterosexual romance and the focus on the heterosexual couple is one of the hallmarks of being modern,' she says. Men and women who had once looked for support from their friendships and extended families, even after they were married, now turned inward toward each other. My parents, who are white and upper-middle class, did exactly this. They believed the family unit superseded other relationships, and my early thinking that female friendships were superfluous came directly from their example and that of other families like ours in my hometown.

Some women, though, have always moved through the world together. In the mid-twentieth century, the professional class focused on their immediate families, but poorer, working-class women, who were white and non-white, continued to depend on larger networks, including relatives and female friends. They leaned on each other for help with childcare and finding jobs, and for companionship needs not met by sexual relationships. 'People who were living from hand to mouth totally needed those additional relationships,' Smith says.

At least in part because they couldn't afford not to, these women raised their friendships to the same level as other relationships in their lives.