14 Books That Should Become the Next Friends

Enjoying the changing dynamics of a group of friends while they navigate jobs, relationships, and city life is what draws viewers to shows like How I Met Your Mother, Girls, Seinfeld, Cheers, and, of course, Friends. Hollywood has snatched up lots of books that follow groups of friends over the years with great success, giving us adaptations of Waiting to Exhale, The First Wives Club, The Ya Ya Sisterhood, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and so on. But there’s a lot more where those came from. TV execs, looking for the next network hit? Consider adapting one of these.

ORIGINAL SERIES—DRAMA
The Group, by Mary McCarthy, is a mid-century classic about eight Vassar graduates. McCarthy’s original, which tackles Depression-era attitudes on sex, parenthood, theater, politics, ambition, breastfeeding, adultery, psychoanalysis, and just about any other topic worth discussing, remains the gold standard of the genre.

SPIN OFF(S)
The Group spawned a thousand imitators, among them A Fortunate Age, by Joanna Rakoff (Oberlin graduates) and Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Smith graduates).

ORIGINAL SERIES—COMEDY
The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe, came out a few years before McCarthy’s masterpiece, in 1958 rather than 1963, and yet has been overshadowed by it, perhaps because Jaffe set her book in what was then the roiling present rather than the stately past. It is The Group’s louder, messier, lowbrow, ethnic, melodramatic cousin, and appropriately, it makes excellent, if sometimes exhausting, company.

SPIN OFF
Outer Banks, by Anne Rivers Siddons, a story about sorority sisters from the 1960s (Randolph University graduates), who reunite later in life when one develops cancer, is campy, breathless fun.

ORIGINAL SERIES—DRAMA
The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud, places a group of privileged  friends (Brown graduates) in contemporary New York City and watches them sweat as they approach the age of 30 like drivers heading straight for a telephone pole. Will they swerve? How soon? What will happen if they don’t?

SPIN OFF
The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, amps up class differences to study the effects of jealousy on friendships, especially as decades pass and luck cuddles up to certain people while bypassing others entirely. For a change, these characters meet at summer camp rather than college; in fact, their fates diverge when they matriculate to different schools.

ORIGINAL SERIES—DRAMA
A Dual Inheritance, by Joanna Hershon, follows the story of two men from very different backgrounds (Harvard graduates) and the woman one of them starts dating. Like The Marriage Plot, it’s technically a love triangle, but one where the ties of friendship are so strong they extend to the next generation.

SPIN OFF
Rich Boy, by Sharon Pomerantz, also looks at how money guides the choices of friends (Tufts graduates) who find they can make smart decisions about their love lives and their careers, just not necessarily at the same time.

ORIGINAL SERIES—DRAMA
The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, is a story of friendships in radical, flammable 1970s Manhattan, seen through the eyes of an introverted young motorcycle-riding artist known only as Reno, after her hometown in Nevada. Although the novel explores other territories—jungles in Brazil, riots in Rome—it’s most vivid when describing the everyday betrayals we visit upon the people we love best.

SPIN OFF
The Lullaby of Polish Girls, by Dagmara Dominczyk, follows three young women from the old world to the new, exposing the fault lines in each.

ALSO CONSIDER: For somewhat lighter fare, Friends and Lovers, by Eric Jerome Dickey, and The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, by Jill Conner Browne.