Smart Girls Like Me

This is a story about what happens when you are twenty-four years old and it is 1999 and you are quite certain that everyone on the planet has been invited to super-fun New Year’s Eve orgies, except you. There is sex, albeit awkward and tentative. There are drugs, however illegal. There is very little rock and roll, but there is, of course, a wedding, and possibly a heroine: Betsy Nilssen, who, daily, finds herself in the sort of Manhattan workplace frequently filled with fashion models. She has a best friend named Bridget, and all Betsy wants is to escape Y2K by fleeing with her to New Zealand, where they could kayak through fjords and make out with surfers.

     But two things happen: Bridget deserts Betsy—if by that we mean that Bridget accepts her boyfriend’s proposal of marriage—and Betsy meets the man of her quite literal dreams. This is a story about what happens when you love tremendously, and desperately, and occasionally unwisely. And it is a story of that one friend: your phone-a-friend with the definition of a tangelo at the ready, the one you call when the world is ending, the one you need, finally, more than any other person on the planet.