921: Friend Zone with Daniel Lavery

Happy Pride month!  Running this show is unfortunately not cheap, and we need all the community support we can get during Pride and beyond to keep the pod going. Now is a perfect time to join our Patreon at the $5/month tier or higher and unlock our growing library of full-length ad-free bonus episodes, ad-free weekly episodes, mp3 downloads of all our original songs, exclusive Discord access to hang out with us, and more! Get an automatic discount on your membership by signing up for an annual subscription. Welcome back to Lez Hang Out, the podcast that is genuinely wondering where adults go to meet new friends. This week, co-hosts Leigh (@lshfoster) and Ellie (@elliebrigida) hang out with New York Times Best Selling author Daniel Lavery to discuss his new fiction novel, Meeting New People, available now. Meeting New People follows the story of Barbara, a difficult, twice-divorced woman in her late 50s, as she grapples with the 9th best-friend-breakup of her life. As Barbara seeks to make her 10th (and hopefully final) best friend, she analyzes her relationships with her past 9 best friends to try to figure out what went wrong.  Although Barbara very much claims to be straight, there is something distinctly sapphic in the intense, monogamous nature of her best-friendships and the way each one burns fast and bright before imploding dramatically. She is a particularly judgemental person who is very set in her ways and has strong beliefs on how the world works and how friendship should be. It vexes her to no end that she has followed all the rules and still ended up alone. Even though Barbara does recognize to some extent that her beliefs and behaviors are alienating her from the very community she so desperately desires, she remains heavily resistant to changing her ways in order to become more palatable. Barbara may have some rigid thought processes and generationally outdated ideas on friendship, but we believe she remains relatable in her strong yearning for understanding, acceptance, and community bonds. We find in Barbara a realistic depiction of self-growth and a glimpse into the challenges of coping with an ever-evolving social landscape.  We’ve all known at least one Barbara in our lives, and as sapphics, we are no stranger to the overly intense, vaguely homoerotic best-friendship that tends to crash and burn. Meeting New People puts us front and center for Barbara’s inner monologues and unique perceptions of reality and asks us to consider if she’s actually wrong or simply unlikeable by today’s standards.  Pick up your own copy of Meeting New People wherever you shop for books or find it at your local library. Don’t forget to show your support for our tiny (and mighty!) podcasting team by shopping small for your Pride merch at bit.ly/lezmerch & picking up our original Lez-ssentials songs on Bandcamp.  Give us your own answers to our Q & Gay on Instagram and follow along on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and BlueSky @lezhangoutpod. Connect with us individually: Ellie Brigida (@elliebrigida). Leigh Holmes Foster (@lshfoster). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices