I started this book once several years ago and didn’t get far, so I didn’t expect it to impress me when I picked it up a second time. But sometimes you have to be in the right head space.

This is my favorite kind of book: character driven. A handful of women are gathering around their beloved friend who is dying of cancer. And the friends are kinda the stereotypes you see in those crises: the one doing all the organizing, demanding answers to tough questions; the one determined the friend Shall Not Die because she will feed her kale and such; the one taking it personally, etc.

The dying woman, Ruth, is drawn enigmatically, a stroke of Berg’s particular genius with characters. She recedes into one-liners and personality-pulsing moments, as the narrator takes up more space in how she is reacting to the impending death.

And the narrator comes out with some cracking observations. Here is one of my favorites: “I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.”

The sweetness of women friends, the horror of a sad thing you cannot fix, the pushes and pulls on women’s time are all here. Berg has a way of pulling together an ensemble cast and not making any of them feel like they are mechanisms serving the plot.

The bickering between L.D., the kale-feeding lesbian friend, and Sarah, the get-the-funeral-arrangements-done buttoned-up-jacket friend, is adorable. So are the moments when Ruth lets fly on the narrator. This book may be about loss, but it has a lot of giggles in it as well. Perhaps they are sweetened by the inevitability of the bitter end to come.

The book also delves into a thing that happens with female friends: jealousy and envy when family obligations are involved. The narrator is abandoning her family temporarily, hoping she isn’t hurting her marriage personally. The dying Ruth has a brother who wants her to die at his house. The decisions characters make are embedded in the reality of the demands on women’s time and our extraordinary capacity to manufacture energy out of sheer need.

Highly recommend this book. You will laugh more than you cry, and sometimes the laughter will be in recognition.