About the Book

There are 161 million women in America today, and our friendships are still as primary and universal as back when Ruth and Naomi, Elizabeth and Susan B., Lucy and Ethel, and Thelma and Louise made history. And that s what makes being dumped by a woman friend so excruciating: you expect romantic relationships to break up eventually but you don t expect it from your friendships. And when it happens, you feel as though there should be an Adele song for you but there isn’t. Dumped: Women Unfriending Women fills that void, exploring the universal experience of being discarded by those from whom you expected more. The essays in Dumped aren’t stories of friendship dying a mutually agreed upon death, or of falling out of touch and reconnecting years later to find you haven t missed a beat. These are stories by established and emerging authors who, like you, may have found themselves erased, without context. These, like your own, are stories that stay with you, maybe for a lifetime.

Genre

Non-fiction/Anthology

Rating

*** (3 Stars)

Review

When I was offered this book, I read the blurb, the foreword, and then the endorsements before proceeding to take on the book itself. So, naturally, I had a certain expectation. It turns out I expected more than it had to offer. That’s not a bad thing, but I was left unsatisfied. I knew it was an anthology, but I also expected there’d be a self-help element to it. That is, after you’ve had a bad experience, how do you cope, and therefore, move forward?

Basically, it’s a collection of true life tales told from each contributor’s point of view—most not understanding the reason for the fallout in their friendships. I’d hoped that inspiring lessons/advice/encouragement would be intentionally drawn out from each story by the contributors after each story was laid out, making it a complete self-help book. Not so. Somewhere in the middle, I got tired and frustrated, and wanted to rush through the book. Some stories were funny and made me chuckle—that helped—but overall, I gained nothing from reading it. For another reader, this book will likely be okay—if you’re seeking the comfort of knowing through true life stories that you’re not alone in experiencing a friendship gone wrong. Like I said, I’m probably dissatisfied because I perceived wrong from the blurb/foreword/endorsements.

Note – Most of the stories were of women who’d lost friends in a bad way. A few, however, were romance stories between women. Since LGBT is not a genre I read in fiction/nonfiction (see my review policy), I skipped them. This, too, contributed to me not fully liking this book. Like I said, I thought that apart from it being an anthology of friendship stories gone wrong, it would be a self-help book as well. It wasn’t.

*Although I offer this review to the public, it’s my opinion and simply that. A thank you to JKS Communications for a free copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

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About the Editor

Nina Gaby is a writer, visual artist and psychiatric nurse practitioner whose essays can be found in collections by Creative Non Fiction, The Best of the Burlington Writer’s Workshop, Seal Press, Wising-Up Press, and several periodicals. Her fiction has been published in Lilith Magazine, the Prose-Poem Project, and in short-story collections by Paper Journey
Press. She works, writes and lives with her family in New England.