Only Taylor Jenkins Reid could make me care this much about straight surfers.

This book is a gorgeous and often heartbreaking picture of one celebrity family's experiences over the course of twenty-four hours, with flashbacks added in to explain their past, including the story of their parents.

The Rivas are very much stuck repeating family patterns and turning into their parents, and I think this book asks whether it's possible to escape that. It's a study in cycles of toxicity and grief and duty and the ways that gendered behavior perpetuates through generations of a family. And yet I felt good at the end of it.

TJR once again tricked me into briefly thinking that fictional celebrities are real people—and yes, the Rivas' father is Mick Riva, who was briefly married to Evelyn Hugo. From what I've gathered, he also appears in Daisy Jones and the Six, which I am intending to read sometime in the next couple weeks.

I related to this book in ways that I'm not comfortable admitting, so instead of talking about that, I'm going to leave you with some favorite quotes:

"The unique combination of audacity and spinelessness."

"She'd never once looked at a man and desired him."

"They were not haunted by the same demons. They were not fighting for the same things."

"Men were bullshit. People were bullshit. And Nina was not going to live through bullshit while wearing high heels a single second longer."
"Hud can fuck all my ex-girlfriends ten times in front of me and I'd still like him more than I like you."

"Rich white people get the benefit of the doubt and all its many benefits."