Talking to the Wolf

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

“Love, first periods, last periods, bullying mothers, disappeared fathers, crazy sisters, children unborn, found, or gone, parents dying too fast or too slow, this apartment, that apartment, an eyebrow raised across a crowded room.”

Four women are steeling themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Lifelong friends, they have seen each other through They are a failed rock star, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope—and one of them is a deeply grieved ghost, whose untimely death has ruptured the once-solid quartet. Set during the day leading up to the reunion as a surprise snowstorm falls over New York City, and moving amongst the four perspectives.

For fans of: The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Massud, The Vacationers, by Emma Staub, the 1980s film, The Big Chill, and calls back through the decades to The Group, by Mary McCarthy.

Advanced Praise

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!

“This tale of four friends (one a ghost) takes us across thirty-five years of tumultuous attachment. How alive these women are—including the dead one—and how forever bonded, even with their separate versions of the truth. A terrific book.”
— Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness

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