PERFECT TUNES

For readers of Stephanie Danler and Nora Ephron, a breakout novel from Emily Gould about music, ambition, sacrifice, and how compromises and rebellion shape women's destinies.

Welcome to New York's East Village at the onset of the 21st century, where there are still grimy coffee shops with computers for Internet and bright-eyed kids barely out of their teens flock to smoke-filled venues, guitars in tow, hoping to be discovered.

Talented but naïve singer/songwriter Laura is one of those kids, who left behind her staid but comfortable life in Ohio for her best friend's sofa. It's only a matter of time before she finds herself in a not-quite relationship with the compellingly sad-eyed frontman of a band on the brink of fame. When he dies on tour, though, and she learns she's pregnant, her life charts a far different course than she ever could have imagined.

Gone are the highs of opening for a chart-climbing new band. Now the only songs she writes are for the infant music classes she teaches, leading drooling infants and their parents in nonsensical sing-alongs. Abandoning all hope of dating in her age range, she marries an older single father with a daughter, Kayla, the same age as her daughter, Marie. As the girls reach adolescence, Laura worries about Marie's bouts of depression and her risk-taking impulsiveness. In her teenage daughter's casual experimentation with alcohol and other substances, she sees the same path to addiction that led Marie's father to drown in a hotel pool. Laura has tried to keep Marie from asking too many questions about her biological father's history, but her efforts to keep Marie safe may only be putting her in greater danger.

As Marie tries to find out who she is, Laura tries to find her way back to becoming the artist she dreamed of being. Their tandem journeys toward self-discovery come together in this sharp, tender story about ambition, sacrifice, and how compromises and rebellion shape women's destinies.

Emily Gould is the author of the novel Friendship and the essay collection And The Heart Says Whatever. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut, and she has written extensively for the New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Cut, Elle, Poetry, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Jezebel, n + 1, and The Economist. She is a former editor of Gawker. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.