Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld

My good friend The Girl Booker brought Triburbia to my attention last year. I've been saving it as one of my summer holiday reads ever since.

And I wasn't disappointed.

Triburbia follows the lives of a group of creative types. They're all 30 pushing 40, married, divorced, with kids, without, gay and straight.

My husband read Triburbia after me which meant that our discussions about the book last over several weeks.

We wondered if we had 'wasted' our lives by not making the kind of money that many of the Tribeca folk obviously had.

My husband wondered if he'd missed his creative opportunities in life á la the memorist  "I thought of all the ways a writer's life could go wrong: never actually writing anything..., losing one's nerve, never having enough time to write, never getting published, never achieving recognition, never making a living, never fulfilling early promise, spending one's career doing the wrong sort of writing, having one's work censored, being imprisoned, always feeling underappreciated, becoming jealous, bitter, angry, resentful, dying undiscovered."

But ultimately, the lives of the characters in Triburbia were so fucked up, that there was nothing to envy at all. They were having affairs, addicted to drugs, work, sex, lies or keeping up with the Jones'. They struggled to be happy in the here and now because they thought they would be happy when....except the when never arrived.

Each chapter is written from a different point of view. You see the main characters through other's peoples eyes and you see certain situations from multiple perspectives. It's fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way!