Out East

Out East is a coming-of-age memoir about finding love and identity in the Hamptons party scene. Recent grad John Glynn joins a summer houseshare where his college friends and friends-of-friends will spend weekends in Montauk. The house, known as the Hive, quickly becomes the scene of friend dramas, the beginning and ending of relationships, connections and missed connections, and realizations.  This is a personal memoir, so the plot is basically watching people go to the Hamptons and back to the city,  drinking a lot and maturing a little.

I enjoyed meeting the Hive tribe, both for the evoking pleasant memories of travel with friends, when travel involved cramming as many people as possible into a rental, but also for a reminder that a lot of that heady friendgroup drama is behind me now. Do I just hang out with fewer people who uncensor their rage after drinking? Or have problem drinkers at 25 learned to drink moderately at 36? Anyway, the toxic drunks in the friendgroup felt terribly familiar, and all of the interpersonal dynamics seemed real. There’s a very honest exploration of the feelings when a group of college friends starts pairing off for marriage, and of the special loneliness found in Manhattan.

This memoir so perfectly describes a lower tier of working Manhattanites. The Hive finds unclaimed Tory Burch flats as they clean their own rental at the end of the summer. Characters take the Jitney back to the office, not a car service. Again, the author perfectly describes the familiar lifestyle of twentysomethings working in Manhattan. 

But sometimes the overwhelming success and privilege makes it harder to empathize with the characters’ emotions. I don’t mean that money automatically equals happiness, just that sharing a story of upper-class misery needs more nuance and skill than the “owner of a $3000 handbag” drinking and moaning about never finding love. Setbacks like a character’s failing startup didn’t really move me (even though I loved this character!) because there was such a cushion of privilege around them, I was never actually worried.  While the author can be pitch-perfect on twentysomething angst, identity, and friendship, some of the privileged setting inherent in a Hamptons summer sometimes causes eyerolls instead of connection.