I was stoked when I saw this book on NetGalley, a feminist book about how important female friendships are? It was right up my alley. Unfortunately, I ended up being somewhat disappointed by the content. Overall, the book is well-written and makes a lot of important points. But these points are surrounded by a meandering narrative that ultimately seemed without purpose.

There were also a couple of points made that I didn’t agree with. First and foremost was the idea that a woman could not have a man as a best friend, “it just doesn’t work that way.” I disagree wholeheartedly. While I see where the author is coming from, I have several male best friends who I’m just as close to as my non-male best friends. There’s nothing I don’t feel comfortable sharing with them, and while they may not have gone through all the same experiences as me, they’re still my best friends.

The majority of the book is anecdotal, with references to pop culture. There’s a bit of historical research mixed in and very little, if any, current research. It’s the author talking about her friendships with women, and interviewing other women about their friendships. All these stories seem to come from a very limited subset of women — upper-middle class straight women. At least, that was the vibe I got. I didn’t mark down details about every single woman she interviewed, but this seemed to be the pattern I saw.

There were a few other things that gave me some serious “yikes” vibes. The author made jokes about strokes, and put in jokes about stalking quotes from an interviewee. There was also one line that really irritated me. The author is talking about a pair of best friends, one straight and one gay. She shared that the friends would go to gay bars together, which is fine, but that “Susanna liked being the only straight girl.” Being queer myself, I’m pretty sick of straight women co-opting gay spaces as their own and I found this inclusion completely unnecessary.

Additionally, the author shared that she didn’t really care about feminism at all until Trump was elected. I think this goes to show the kind of privilege she has lived with, and that she isn’t really qualified to speak for women at large. I was surprised that she even admitted to this, but I think that just means that she doesn’t see any issue with it.

I will note again that I am reading an unfinished copy, so it would be interesting to know if any of these things were left out of the final copy.

Overall, Text Me When You Get Home was an enjoyable read. It was nice reading about relationships between women, but I didn’t feel like I was learning anything. I would be interested in seeing a book written about relationships between women that goes more in depth than this one, and that discusses women from different backgrounds. I won’t tell anyone not to read this book, but I think it’s good to go into it not expecting it to be a gamechanger.

An examination of the importance of female friendship, Text Me When You Get Home is sure to inspire a reflection about the role of female friendship in your life. Part memoir and part social history, Schaefer's stories and illustrations show the many ways female friendship has evolved over the years.

"Text me when you get home" is a statement women use for many reasons. It's to make sure our friend is safe or because we want an update on the cute guy they met at the bar or because we simply don't want the conversation to end. The phrase grounds this work and offers a place for Schaefer to start her exploration.

The author and I have had drastically different experiences with friendship. The arc of Schaefer's story of how she came to appreciate female friendship is well worth reading. In the second chapter, she examines the prevalence of the myth of mean girls, a myth she bought into. I never thought girls were mean- I thought there were kids who are mean. While I wouldn’t want to repeat junior high or high school, reading about Schaefer's experiences made me even more grateful for the friends I had back then. I lucked out.

In fact, I've lucked out regarding female friendship throughout my life. While my local community hasn't always been as big as I've wanted, I have always, always had at least a few close friends. As I've grown older, I've stayed connected to a large number of friends, not only across the US but around the world. So often I'd finish reading a chapter and be awash with gratitude for the women in my life. Don't be surprised if you feel a deep need to call or text your friends to tell them how wonderful they are.

The release of Text Me When You Get Home could not be more timely. As I read my advance copy, the #MeToo movement had started to emerge and it made for quite the backdrop to my reading experience. The book illustrated the many ways women look out for one another and support each other.

The book offers mostly the perspective of white straight women and this is a missed opportunity. I did appreciate Schaefer's examination of class and how this affects the way we approach friendship. The history of friendship over the ages could have been more in-depth but if you're not aware of the history, as say presented in Bachelor Girl or All The Single Ladies, it's a good place to start.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the way pop culture factored in. For instance, we learn the history of Galentine's Day, which was created on Parks & Rec and has become an actual holiday women celebrate in the years since. That was such a good show. Just thinking about Leslie and Ann's friendship makes me happy.

I hadn't thought about the way friendship was presented on shows like Golden Girls or Designing Women—this made me appreciate even more how groundbreaking they were— or how they paved the way for shows like Girlfriends and Sex and the City.

I'm really glad I read this. My female friends mean so much to me and I hope there will continue to be more discussion about and appreciation of the importance of friendship.

I really enjoyed reading this book and told everyone who stood next me longer than 5 minutes about this book. Going into detail about how friendship between female friends have changed over the decades was thought-provoking and incredibly interesting.
The Pros: The way Kayleen Schaefer writes had just a nice flow and rhythm and I was deeper into the book than I thought on more than one occasion. I really enjoyed her own stories mingled in with the examples from women she interviewed, as it brought a personal touch to what could have been an objective piece of information.
The Cons: Unfortunately, I was only able to get through half of the book before my grad school classes started up and ran out of personal time to read as fast as I wanted to. Hopefully, once things calm down again, I will be able to get right back into Text Me When You Get Home.

I've been surrounded by women my entire life. I have four sisters who are as close to me as possible. I have a best friend who I have lived with for the last 12 years. I lived in an all female dorm in college. Every single one of those women are part of my life.

Female friendships are often portrayed as vapid or competitive. Text Me When You Get Home takes that notion and flips it over. This is the book that weaves historical discussion on the evolution of female friendships with the writer's own experiences. There's a familiarity to her stories.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Rarely in recent memory have I had such strong feelings about a book, both positive and negative. While reading, I kept texting a friend of mine to tell her about the various anecdotes and stories laid out in this book, sometimes in frustration, and sometimes in joy. If nothing else, this book is compelling.

The author, Kayleen Schaefer, does an excellent job of weaving her own memories and stories of her friends in with an exploration of female friendship in the 20th century (although shoehorned in at the end is a discussion of 19th century Boston marriages, which I feel deserved more attention and context). Starting with her time in high school as a "mean girl," Schaefer describes her journey from internalized misogyny to recognizing the importance and criticality of women in her adult life, which was a nicely explored storyline and did culminate in the close group of friends she now has. She ties in interviews with women she has known throughout her life, including her high school "Queen Bee," her mother, and her current best friend, as well as media examples, such as the movie Mean Girls and the book it was based on.

We also examine her first job in the professional world, which was at Details magazine. I found it interesting to see the perspective of a woman who worked at a men's magazine because she despised the frivolous content of women's magazine's, only to later realize her hypocrisy at writing articles about the same kinds of things she thought were frivolous when about women. Slowly, Schaefer overcomes her internalized misogyny and begins forging friendships intentionally, recognizing how important they are to her. The book does stumble here at times, taking much too long on some things and not enough on others, but there's a lot of good information tied in with Schaefer's anecdotes.

However, I found the second half of the book, which focuses more on other women's experiences and media examples of friendships, much more compelling than the first. Here, Schaefer starts doing what I had hoped this book would do from the beginning, which is posit a new way to situate friendship within our society. Instead of earlier in the book, when she and her friends would go to bars specifically to meet men or would date the same man and fight about it, this section actually starts to push the boundaries of heteronormativity, and challenges the notion that romantic relationships take precedence over friendships. The anecdotes from women whose best friends are their emergency contacts, the ones who got them through chemo, or their true "soulmates" over their romantic partners were absolutely the best part of this book. The notion that your "best friend" should also be the person you marry is deconstructed, and that is to Schaefer's credit- I think that notion is unhealthy and it's wonderful to see it challenged here.

However, this book struggles in two areas; diversity and heteronormativity. When exploring why women psychologically need friends, Schaefer cites a study that suggests women are psychologically wired to nurture, which made me cringe. Evolutionary psychology really shouldn't have had a place in this book. I would much more interested in a historical contextualization of women working together as a community, and how that idea has changed over time post-industrial era. In addition, there was very little challenging of heteronormativity here, including a shockingly small mention of the LGBTQ community, who have traditionally been at the front of the found family concept. Where was a mention of The L Word, which revolves around a group of female friends just like Sex and the City? Even when discussing a straight and lesbian best friend pairing, little exploration was done into the context, which was surprising.

Most of the sources in this book are also about white women, which was glaringly obvious. There are about 10 pages towards the end that incorporate a number of more diverse media sources, but the bulk of this book deals with white women- in fact, in the conclusion section when Schaefer is tying up all her loose ends, the only women quoted are white women. This was a glaring oversight and a little unfortunate. More historical context about non-white female communities would have been a nice addition.

Overall, this was a book I am very glad that I read. There is a lot contained in it, but at times I think Schaefer could have gone a little further with her analysis. It is a very timely and important book, however, and one I'm so glad was published. It made me realize how lucky I am to have all the women in my life that I do, both past and present, and recognize that the "all-in-one" family idea is perhaps no longer relevant for our time. Instead, we all need a group of female friends who will text us when they get home.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

"Text me when you get home" is a phrase unique to the female experience which makes it the perfect title for this book about female friendship. As author Kayleen Schaefer points out, when a female friend asks you to text them when you get home it means they can identify with the fear of being female. It means they care about you. It means they love you. It's that love that Kayleen is focusing on. The kind of love that you can only get through female friendship. I really enjoyed reading the historical and pop culture history of female friendship as told by Kayleen. I found myself nodding along to her musings and laughing in agreement to her anecdotes. If 2018 is the year of women, Text Me When You Get Home is the perfect book to start it off.

Text Me When You Get Home‘s title is based off of how lady friends will often end an in person hang out by telling each other to “text me when you get home,” like a subtle “I love you” and acknowledgment of the potential for danger that lurks beneath any women’s experience moving from one place to another. As someone who does this regularly with my friends, I LOVED the premise of this book (anecdote: I also paid more attention to how my friends reacted to me saying this at the conclusion of our hangs while reading: women always responded positively, straight + cis men literally guffawed at the thought [unless they were related to me], men who weren’t straight or cis reacted less strongly than women, but still positively). Despite loving the premise of this book, I felt like something was missing from these essays detailing the histories of female friendships, how they currently exist, and what influences them.

I’ve been paying attention to how this subject matter is covered for a while, so I was thrilled to see a formal gathering of everything related to girls’ and women’s friendships. Text Me When You Get Home compiles existing thoughts and dissects them further, but there are some important pieces missing. I felt like there should’ve been a better historical dive (such as exploring Victorian lady friendships in more depth than the brief description within the conclusion) or that there had been further explanation of how friendships did exist before the 1950s ideal of romantic marriages took over instead of detailing one example of letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. I would have also liked more emphasis on how the rise of dating culture had an inverse effect on women’s friendships with each other. This piece is brushed upon a fair amount, but if there had been discussion about how these friendships HAD existed and then disappeared, it would have made this book a little stronger.
I was familiar with most of the media examples explored (except for the film Girls Trip, which I promptly watched on a flight after reading this book; do recommend!), so there wasn’t a lot of new information for me. This is probably why I found the book a bit disappointing because I’ve read similar thoughts expounded upon before. However, if this is your first time exploring the topic of lady friendships or you have found yourself newly enjoying your lady friends after casting off their potential previously, this is a great book for you. If you’ve been embracing the many wonders of close lady friendships for some time and recognize the special and multitude roles they fulfill in your life and love reading about lady friendships, both real and depicted in media, this might feel a lil redundant and late to the party.
Kayleen Schaefer, the author, used to work on staff at magazines, and she describes her initial condemnation of superficial women’s magazines (and acknowledges this), but this felt a little odd to me. Her previous self thought it was trivial to read or write about things like women’s hair management, etc., despite writing about the same topics for a (now defunct) men’s magazine. Unfortunately, Schaefer doesn’t ever really assert that caring about these topics, from either a women’s or men’s perspective, shouldn’t be frowned upon and that maybe she’s still viewing topics of worth through a male lens. She does combats this slightly, but it felt like walking through molasses to get there: “I was undermining and dismissing my sex by not seeing us as complex people who shouldn’t have to conform to anyone’s standard of what’s cool or not,” (p. 108; from Advance Reader’s Copy and may not be how this is worded in the published version).
What I liked best in Text Me When You Get Home were other people’s quotes (Judy Bloom, etc.), so I almost felt like this would’ve worked better as a colorful coffee table book with selected quotes from interviews conducted by the author about friendship on bright pages instead.

To reiterate, I do think this will be a good read for someone who is a novice in exploring lady friendships. If you’ve already been wading in the waters for a bit (literarily and with your own relations), it might be worth passing on this and finding a good long read instead.

Kayleen Schaefer has written an interesting and heartfelt analysis of female friendships and its significance. She uses both real life and fictional accounts to demonstrate her points, which include the judgments passed on female friendships, as well as the growing trend of women choosing to rely mainly on friends instead of husbands/spouses. The stories make you feel good and remind you of the positive ways that women exist without men. Unfortunately, the analysis could have been a bit deeper at times and it would have been nice for Schaefer to address queer/straight friendships before the conclusion. Overall, though, it is a positive read and would be recommended for all women and men open to positive porrtayals of women.