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Season three of HBO’s The White Lotus includes an achingly familiar friendship dynamic between three women. Three adult women have known each other since childhood and are on a girls’ trip to reconnect, but whenever one leaves the room, the other two inevitably gossip about the other. Their long-standing connection is clear, as is their eagerness to air distaste for each other’s life decisions. A column from The Toast called “Hey Ladies,” started more than a decade ago, explores a similar phenomenon through one year of bachelorette event planning.
Hey Ladies!: The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails by Caroline Moss and Michelle Markowitz
This book is a full-color epistolary novelization of the former Toast column. Carolyn Bahar illustrates their email correspondence and side text conversations but also includes several slyly funny maps, photos, and online shopping windows that display the ladies’ priorities.
This is a book full of archetypal characters: a bride-to-be, the friend who loves to take charge with plans, someone who feels left out, a girl who’s a little too crunchy granola, and more. The women’s feelings about the upcoming wedding and their involvement heighten the satire of a group of bridesmaids.
The story opens with a long email from Jen, happily partnered in New Jersey. She’s expecting an engagement soon. Her friends are happy for her, especially when she does get engaged, but also focused on their own prospects for both marriage and career. The friends constantly take to email to plan and air grievances with their lives, and miscommunications are common. Ali, a PR executive, takes charge of the whole bridesmaid planning, though Jen’s close friend Morgan was expecting to be Maid of Honor.
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Aside from that tension, their friend Caitlin is obsessed with wellness, while Nicole is constantly strapped for cash. Their friend Ashley is stuck out of the loop in Connecticut, while Katie is obsessed with recapturing the attention of an old flame. The friend who never responds, Gracie, also becomes a point of contention since her lack of responses leads to her getting unexplained Venmo requests for hundreds of dollars.
As Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss said in an interview on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, an email thread that starts with “hey ladies” will end with you owing someone money for a group trip you might not even want to go on. The emails in this book are also full of requests for someone else to google something, deep Internet stalking of each other’s exes, and lightly passive-aggressive comments about each other’s life choices.
Despite the arguments and consistent miscommunications, the women are fiercely devoted to each other’s happiness. They wouldn’t fight it out over email so much if they didn’t care. The next time your friend plans a wedding, you can use this book as an advice column for how to be upfront about what you want and honest about how much money you can realistically commit to a bachelorette weekend.
