Talking to the Wolf

by Rebecca Chace

Overview

“It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us.”—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist

Talking to the Wolf is a poignant and haunting exploration of female friendship that unearths the past and the ghosts we carry into the present.

Four women. Thirty-five years. A lyrical and unsettling look at female friendship across time. 

A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship across decades.

Like a Meg Wolitzer novel shot by filmmaker Nicole Holofcener and blessed by Virginia Woolf, Talking to the Wolf pole-vaults over the Bechdel Test.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636284620
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/19/2026
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Chace is the award-winning author of Leaving Rock Harbor (New York Times Editor’s Choice; New England Book Awards Finalist, June Indie Notable Book); Capture the Flag; Chautauqua Summer (New York Times Notable and Editor’s Choice); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle-grade). She is also the author of plays, screenplays, and literary essays. She has written for The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, The Yale Review, Guernica, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. Grants and fellowships include Civitella Ranieri, MacDowell, Yaddo, American Academy in Rome (visiting artist), Dora Maar House, and many others. She is faculty associate and program manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

Talking to the Wolf is a stunning, intricate portrayal of close female bonds forged in adolescence. It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us. Rebecca Chace has written an intimate, luminous, and deeply absorbing novel, one that I didn’t want to end.”
—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist

“Rebecca Chace’s Talking to the Wolf is so richly peopled I feel like I could put a letter in the mail to any of its characters. Each of them is so full of singular life, so delightfully, painfully earnest in their messy trying. This is a book about friendship, family, love, memory, and the metamorphic, often corrosive, effect of time on each. As Chace’s characters move into shaky reunion, their pasts and presents tangle and fray, forcing them to finally put into words what has for too long remained unspoken. After all, as one of them concludes, ‘There might be a song in it.’”

—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From the Publisher