“There was also the fact that the college celebrated diversity, but no one ever mentioned the women, mostly women of color, doing the work to prepare the food, to make the place beautiful, so the students could grow and learn and thrive. The housekeeping staff was almost entirely black, while black students made up just four percent of the student body. They studied historic inequality in their classes, they read about racial and economic injustice, and still they were expected to ignore this uncomfortable truth, to live with it.”
Many reviewers commented that Friends and Strangers is a slow-moving novel. I would agree with that; however, I think that the emphasis on dialog, settings, and backstories is deliberately slow and successful. There are important themes and questions for “self-talk” that Courtney Sullivan conveys through the main characters, Elisabeth, a 30-something married mother of an infant, and Sam, a female college student whom Elisabeth hires to babysit and eventually treats as her confidant.
Relationships in the story will remind the astute reader of the chasm between rich and poor as well as the conflicts in everyday life between the working-class and upper-class as well as the genuinely privileged vs. “others.” Examples include:
Elisabeth, who comes from wealth, and her husband, Andrew, who doesn’t
Elisabeth, who doesn’t understand her privilege, and Sam, the babysitter who comes from a struggling working-class family
Sam, who is working to afford her college education, and her roommate Isabella, who is very wealthy
Sam, whose family struggles to make ends meet, and the Hispanic workers in the school cafeteria.
In addition to the class and monetary differences, personal values were explored through the characters’ actions, conversations, and thoughts. For example, the concepts of honesty and deception play out using some hefty life decisions. While you’re reading, think about:
Elisabeth and Andrew
Elisabeth and Sam
Sam and Clive
Elisabeth and her parents/sister; Elisabeth and Andrew’s parents
As I read, I just kept asking myself questions such as:
Can a person of wealth marry a working-class person and be happy?
Is one still privileged if she purposely separates from her family?
Are we destined to repeat our parents’ mistakes? Inherit their personalities? Share their worst traits?
What is the line between supporting/networking and interfering with another’s life?
How profound is the blindness we have to our internal conflicts?
Why do we not have greater insight into the way we treat others?
Why is the manipulation of low-level workers so prevalent in our culture—even at the places where “they preach against it?”
At what stage of life should we take advice from someone who has been through it already–or do we always have to learn for ourselves?
