The Red Book

Clover, Addison, Mia and Jane were college roommates until their graduation from Harvard in 1989. Now, twenty years later, their lives are in freefall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman Brothers and living the Manhattan dream, is out of a job, newly married and fretting about having a baby. Addison’s marriage to a novelist with writer’s block is as stale as her artistic ‘career’.

Mia’s acting ambitions never got off the ground, and she stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her Hollywood director husband can pay the bills. Jane, former Paris bureau chief for a newspaper and the victim of budget cuts, has been blindsided by different sorts of loss.

The four friends have kept up with one another via the Red Book, published every five years, in which alumni write brief updates about their lives. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as the classmates arriving at their twentieth reunion with their families, histories, dashed dreams and secret longings, will discover over the course of an epoch-ending, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

Deborah Copaken Kogan is the author of Between Here and April, a novel, and Shutterbabe, the bestselling memoir about her years as a war photographer. Her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times. She has written for the New York Times, Elle, More, Slate and Paris Match, amongst others. She lives in Harlem, New York.