The False Friend [Hardcover]

Myla Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 5, 2010

From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two  eleven-year-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out . . .

Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened.

The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both.

Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past.

Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Goldberg's unremarkable latest, a neatly constructed if hollow story of memory and deception, begins in the woods surrounding a small upstate New York town, as 11-year-old Celia watches her best friend, Djuna, get into a stranger's car, never to be seen again. At least that's the story Celia gives to the police. Twenty-one years later, Celia returns to her hometown to tell her family and old friends what really happened that fateful day, but her new version of the disappearance is met with disbelief by family and old friends. Meanwhile, Celia's image of her childhood identity is shattered as she listens to descriptions of herself as a child: she was sweet to some, cruel and bullying to others. Goldberg successfully evokes the shades of gray that constitute truth and memory, but her tendency toward self-conscious writerliness and grand pronouncements ("The unadult mind is immune to logic or foresight, unschooled by consequence, and endowed with a biblical sense of justice") prevents the narrative from breaking through its muted tones. Goldberg misplays the setup, trading psychological suspense for a routine story of self-discovery.
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From Booklist

Celia Durst decides, after 20 years, to come clean. At the age of 10, she was responsible for the disappearance of her unpredictable best friend, Djuna. Traipsing with their girlhood clique through an unfamiliar forest, only Celia saw Djuna fall into a hole in the ground, but hot-headed from the fight the two were having, she decided to tell everyone that Djuna was picked up by a stranger. Now thirtysomething and successful, Celia leaves Chicago to replant herself in her childhood home and confess to her family and the other girls involved. It turns into an agonizing process, however, when no one believes Celia’s “new” story—especially not the other three girls, who all claim to have seen the car Djuna got into. Newly obsessed with knowing what she was like as a child, Celia spends the bulk of the novel imploring her 10-year-old self to manifest at her side, but she first must realize what the younger Celia lost that day in the forest. Readers are kept guessing until the final pages and, as in Bee Season (2000), Goldberg uses beautiful, emotionally descriptive language to keep us with one ear to the ground, listening for the slow, quiet footsteps of creeping tragedy. --Annie Bostrom

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (October 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527217
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527217
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #811,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written book that reveals itself slowly October 9, 2010

By Barbara J. King

Format:Hardcover

I'm going to disagree with the reviews so far posted. Myla Goldberg's newest novel lived up to all my ocnsiderable expectations after her fabulous 'Bee Season'; 'The False Friend' invited me into a world that wavers between the remembered past and the lived present with subtlety and great perception. I do understand why it's tempting to use the term 'confusing' regarding the time-skipping plot, but I found that when I slowed down my reading, refusing to rush along at a clip meant for a thriller and instead took the time to linger and let the sentences seep into my consciousness, much came to the fore.

Celia's return to her past-its-glory-days hometown is described with aching insight-- the ways that our adult selves telescope back into our adolescent selves when we return to visit our parents is the best treatment of this topic I've read. The alternating extreme tenderness and seething frustration one may feel for loved ones comes across gorgeously in the dropped gaze, the sighing acquiescence to family tradition, the lost moment when one can't quite come out with what one needs to say.

As for the central event-- the central memory that drives the plot, the thing that happened when Celia was 11 and transforming from a good girl into not such a good girl under the influence of her new friend Djuna-- it is told in overlapping memories from a number of central characters. Slowly, bit by bit, things become fuller and clearer as we read along, and in the end, the wrap-up is a great mix of clarity (the central mystery is, it seems to me, solved) and open-ended room for readers' imagining of the characters' mindsets and next steps in their lives. Very highly recommended and I hope Ms. Goldberg keeps writing novels! [...]

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Woman Searches for the Truths of her Childhood October 5, 2010

By Bonnie Brody TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Celia Durst and Djuna Pearson are best friends in middle school and have been queens of their clique since elementary school. They have a very tight, mercurial and labile relationship but they usually get over their fights very quickly. One day, as they are acting out by walking in a wooded area where they aren't supposed to go, Djuna and Celia have a fight. Celia walks away from Djuna and moments later Djuna is abducted by a man in a brown car. Three of the other girls from their clique are there and witness this event. Djuna is never seen or heard from again despite extensive police investigation. Celia can never remember the details of the event until she becomes an adult and then her memory of what actually happened is very different from what allegedly transpired.

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg opens twenty years after Djuna's disappearance. Celia is an auditor for the city of Chicago and has been living with Huck, a history teacher, since right after college. Her relationship with Huck is in stasis and Celia is worried that he will leave her. Huck wants children and Celia is not up for parenting. Celia suddenly has a recovered memory about Djuna's disappearance. She remembers walking with Djuna, the two of them having a fight, and then Djuna falling into a hole (like an abandoned well) while Celia just walks away and leaves her there, never telling anyone. Celia decides to fly back east to upstate New York where she grew up to do some reality-testing. She wants to tell her parents about her memories and talk to the other girls who were there that day.

This book is as much about the relationships of ten and eleven year old girls as it is about Djuna's disappearance. Ms. Goldberg's knowledge of the way that girls can be cruel to one another is right on the mark. There is one girl named Leanne who is always trying to be part of Djuna and Celia's group but they make it almost impossible for her. Instead of telling her no or ignoring her, they shame and humiliate her. "Standing Leanne against the flagpole had lent their scrutiny an official air. Starting from her head, they worked their way down, inspecting the way she pushed her hair behind her ears, the slope of her neck as it emerged from her shirt, or some other random aspect of Leanne's body completely beyond her control. Occasionally they would give Leanne homework, and she would show up the next day wearing something with flowers on it, or having curled her bangs. A passed inspection meant she was free to join them at lunch and recess: failure meant she had to earn their company." This ritual was repeated daily and Leanne was graded harshly, especially by Djuna. This went on for several grades. Sadly, Leanne was such an easy mark and never spoke up for her own defense nor gave up trying to please the unpleasable.

Right after Celia recovers her memory, she returns to her hometown and tries to research the events of the traumatic day that Djuna disappeared. She attempts to contact the other girls, now women, to see what they remember. One of them has been so traumatized by Djuna's disappearance that it is reflected in her life's work. Celia finds out how immeasurably painful their treatment of Leanne was to her. Many of the realizations she acquires are more about the way they were as girls than about the disappearance itself. I think that this is one of the main points that Ms. Goldberg is making in the book - Celia is hoping to find something out that can no longer be separated from who she was as a girl.

Complicating matters is the way that Celia's parents interact with each other and with Celia. They are both quite repressed and restrained individuals. Emotions are hard for them to show. Celia begins to see herself in her parents and compares this to Huck's love and emotional expressiveness versus her personal restraint.

As Celia discusses her new revelations with Huck, her parents and her childhood friends, they all have different reactions to her. What is more interesting than their reactions, however, is what she finds out about them now in comparison to who they were when they were children. The book touches on nature and nurture along with the difficulties of child-rearing, especially parents allowing for autonomy and individuation.

This book is a literary mystery on several levels. It is a search for the truth of that one day when Djuna disappears, the search for who these five girls were twenty years ago, and how these girls became the women they are today. While Ms. Goldberg is excellent at portraying the behaviors and emotions of pre-adolescent girls, segments of the book can be confusing and create challenges. At times I became unclear about what Celia is looking for and what she actually finds. Perhaps this is part of the mystery. When we go back into the past, we can only go so far and we can't take our childhood selves with us as adult excavators.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A page-turner to nothingness November 9, 2010

By Someone Like You

Format:Hardcover

I wouldn't pay full freight for this book. Buy it used or get it at the library. The author is clearly a skilled wordsmith but in the end all those nice, funny, quirky sentences don't add up to anything. There must three similies per page plus hundreds of metaphors and in the end the narrative collapses under their weight. So much time is spent evoking the childhood home, the cars, the pictures, the smells, the meals, the parents, the brother, the block, the school, the friend's houses, etc., etc., etc., that very little actually happens. This might be ok if something was Revealed but in fact very little is revealed either about the missing girl or the protagonist. Memory is illusive. Ok, but who doesn't know that? Faulkner said it eighty years ago: Memory believes before knowing remembers. That's pretty much the thesis of the book. I agree with other reviewers: more time spent on implications of bullying or more substance to the mystery might have yieled a much, much better book. Instead, it was very rote: she goes home, she conducts interviews, boyfriend visits, she interviews most important subject last, book ends. It all felt very formulaic to me but lacked the punch writers use formulas to achieve, namely a knockout surprise ending.