Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

I have loved college novels like Commencement since reading The Group decades ago, and I always wished I could have gone away to college instead of attending a commuter college. In her debut novel, J. Courtney Sullivan, a Smith College graduate herself, features her alma mater in the story of four college gals who were quad-mates and their lives after college. If you know anything about Smith, you know it is a liberal school, and according to one of the characters, there are a lot of “confused people” who attend Smith. If books about open lesbian and transgender folk offend you, this is probably a book to skip. I continued with it because it was the debut novel for this writer, and I wanted to see how she started her writing career.

The four characters who graduated in 2002 are very different from each other: Celia drinks too much and hooks up with all the wrong guys; Bree has enormous family support until she breaks her engagement to a boy back home and takes up with someone her family doesn’t approve of; Sally, a poor little rich girl who has just lost her mother to cancer, and April, the work-study student who has strong opinions and is the ultra-feminist in the story.

The author takes the reader through the foundation of the friendships and then moves the characters to a few years in the future when one of the gals is getting married and the other three will be in her wedding. In some ways, the characters have remained the same and in some ways, they are more so than they were in college.

J. Courtney Sullivan has written for the New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, and Real Simple among other publications. Her fifth novel Friends and Strangers was published this year. Reese Witherspoon has optioned one of her other books for a movie. Born in Massachusetts, the author lives in Brooklyn with her family.