Why Finding a Village is so Hard

PLUS a book giveaway!

Weekly reminder to spread the word about The Parisian Heist. What sells books? Word of mouth. How does that happen? No one knows! So tell two friends about it today.

I had my first baby in San Francisco and I had exactly one friend at the time and she had no interest in babies (I love you Amy and you’re a great mom now).

One day when I was visibly pregnant, eating Ethiopian food at a dive bar by our house called Club Waziema a woman walked over to my table. She slipped me a folded piece of paper like we were about to make some kind of drug deal. To be honest, the idea of a drug deal seemed kind of exciting at nine months pregnant. I must look very intriguing, I thought.

She smiled and whispered, “We have a group.”

On the piece of paper was the information for her new moms’ group. They met at neighborhood bars and coffee shops, hung out in parks and sometimes sipped beers while their newborns flopped around in the grass. I accepted her creepy offer and showed up to one after I gave birth.

Those women didn’t throw me in a van and try to murder me. They actually became my first mom friends.

That village changed my life.

We kept expanding it in a bunch of other low-fi ways. I’d see another exhausted-looking woman pushing a stroller down the street and ask, “Do you like beer and sausage?”

If she said yes, I’d tell her, “Great. We have a fire pit. Come over Friday.”

And if she didn’t like beer and sausage? It probably had a low-ish chance of working out anyway. If she merely tolerated beer and sausage, that was sometimes a match.

Eventually our village began peeling off one by one. San Francisco is a stupidly expensive place. Families moved away. Our village slowly scattered. It’s one of the reasons we eventually packed up and headed back to Philadelphia.

In Philly I had a head start. A bunch of my college friends still lived there and I was able to inherit their villages.

But I know that’s not how it works for everyone.

One of the questions I hear over and over again from new moms is: How do you actually find your village? What does a village even look like? And once you’ve found one, how do you become the kind of person who helps hold it together?

We’ve talked about those questions a lot on Under the Influence. You can listen to one of my favorite episodes here.

This desperation for a village in the early days of new motherhood is the heart of Amy Chozick’s new novel, that gets right to the heart of the village conversation With Friends Like You.

Here’s the tldr on the book.

Emily is unmoored as a new mother in Manhattan—exhausted, broke, and slipping away from her well-meaning husband. She becomes fixated on finding the one person who ever truly understood her: her college roommate, Daisy. Cool, poetry-reading Daisy, who vanished years ago, after she took a job dancing at a strip club off campus.

In her desperate search, Emily tumbles from new-mom message boards into a world of sex work, secrets, and a high-end escort service for global billionaires, hitting one dead end after another. Until the unthinkable happens: Daisy suddenly reappears.

Daisy infuses Emily’s life with newfound purpose and community as the two launch a new mothers’ group in a vacant luxury skyscraper (matcha on tap, vibrators on offer). But the joy of their reunion soon fades, revealing deep, unsettling cracks in their relationship. Is Daisy the key to Emily’s happiness, or is she unraveling her world? And where has Daisy really been all these years?

With Friends Like You is a story of feverish obsession, new motherhood, and a fractious friendship pushed to the edge.

We are going to give away two signed copies to you! To enter (U.S. only), leave a comment with your best advice for a new mom trying to find her village. I can’t wait to read your stories. Here’s a peak at the inspiration for Amy’s new book.

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With Friends Like You

By Amy Chozick

Find your village… The promise was irresistible. I was a brand new mom, eager for community, friendship, and a way to entertain my newborn in those early days in New York, which lasted approximately eight thousand hours. And here was the Peanut app, which promised to connect me to like-minded mothers who would offer “advice without judgement.”

I signed up immediately, obviously. But a couple of days later, as my baby slept and I scrolled, it occurred to me that this wasn’t actually a village. It was just another reason to stare at my phone. And did I really want to share his data online before he shed his umbilical cord?

So much of what used to be actual human interactions have been replaced by social media, but when it comes to those early months of motherhood, the empty promise of “community” in the form of clicks became even more stark. I have friends who found real-life friendships and comfort through Peanut — and this is a judgment free zone! But for me, it only drove home that where we used to have community, cousins, aunts, grandmothers, neighbors, children raised by many arms, we now have wait lists, security fobs, day cares tucked between office lobbies. And an app.

The experience stayed with me and inspired my debut novel WITH FRIENDS LIKE YOU. Emily is a new mom in Manhattan, lonely, adrift and still recovering from a traumatic birth. She decides the answer to all of her problems is tracking down her college roommate, Daisy. They were the closest of friends — soul mates, she calls them — until Daisy started stripping and then disappeared into a world of drugs and sex work.

Emily’s search takes her down some very dark corners of the Internet, bolstered by her community on the fictional Juju Bean app, basically a dating app for new moms. Sure, I wanted to poke some satirical fun at the strangeness of modern motherhood, but I also wanted to explore what happens when the “village” becomes a screen and community becomes clicks. In the case of Emily, she and Daisy (spoiler, they reunite!) build an actual community by setting a new mother’s group in a vacant luxury condo on Billionaires Row — and yes, it slowly descends into something darker and cult-like, but for a while, that human interaction is beautiful.

Writing these chapters felt like wish fulfillment. New moms together in real life, no judgement, crying, laughing, enjoying quality childcare, a place to wipe a butt that isn’t a Starbucks bathroom and all the avocado toast they can eat. If only an app could promise us that…

Here’s an excerpt of the Juju Bean moms in WITH FRIENDS LIKE YOU:

THE MOMS ON THE Juju Bean app talked a lot about “mom brain.” This ranged from harmless forgetfulness to full- blown delirium. One mom could not, for the life of her, think of the name of that guy who starred in Top Gun; another reported her car stolen at the Westfield mall in Paramus when she’d just forgotten where she parked it. We were all losing our minds. Paranoia, delusion, mood swings. Half of us had gotten MRIs, convinced we had a brain tumor. The neurologist always said the same thing—“You’re just a new mother.”

One mom physically assaulted a Target employee who told her they were sold out of Happy Baby teething wafers. Another admitted that she had full conversations with the gadgets in her son Aiden’s nursery. She told the Halo SleepSure Monitor and the Hatch Rest sound machine things she’d never told anyone. Then there was @BoyMomBrynn, who misplaced her cell in the microwave. She didn’t find it until she tried to heat up Gerber baby cereal and it exploded. Luckily, she’d been in the bedroom. The baby was fine. She posted a photo of the open- concept kitchen in her Cobble Hill co‑op apartment. It looked like Fallujah. @EatinVeganMama warned us all never to heat a baby’s food in the microwave. “The radiation causes autism!”

Growing up, I’d never imagined myself as a mom, and my mother always assumed that if it happened, it would be an accident and we’d have to drive to Mexico. Maybe if we’d been on speaking terms, I could’ve asked her about the night terrors, the blood clots, the engorged nipples. She could’ve assured me that she never breastfed and I turned out fine . . . well, basically fine. Instead, I became close to @MamaBearlyHangingOn, who thought my real name was @EstherGreenwood. She confessed that after every two a.m. feeding, she’d roam her suburban streets. She’d leave some breast milk out in a cat bowl on the front step of an abandoned home, a ritual to appease the devil. To be clear, she knew this was deranged. She wasn’t even Catholic. But at twenty- seven weeks, after she’d recently watched Rosemary’s Baby, she started to bleed heavily. The ob‑gyn told her it was a miscarriage and to get to the ER immediately for a D& C to flush out her uterus. She prayed. Begged that her baby would live. The scan showed a heartbeat, but the doctor warned of “intrapartum death.” @MamaBearlyHangingOn started going to church. She cut a deal. An offering to Satan for a healthy baby.

A whole society of hormonal weirdos, sharing stories about leaky nipples and pelvic- floor therapy. (“It’s finger rape!!!” @Mothera417 wrote, with a Handmaid’s Tale GIF. “Stop screaming,” @ZenMamaLlama replied.) If I couldn’t admit to this group that all I thought about— side from keeping my tiny, perfect human alive— as finding the exotic dancer who I roomed with my freshman year in college, then who could I tell?

I didn’t even know if Daisy was still a sex worker. Her grandmother had dementia. Her mother didn’t return my calls. Maybe she’d gotten clean, turned her life around. Maybe her mom’s latest husband had paid to send her to a spa- like rehab facility. Maybe she met an Exxon executive named Brad and lives in a leafy suburb with a three- car garage. Maybe they buy art on cruise ships. Maybe she has a couple of kids whom she drives to soccer because football causes concussions. Maybe she does Pilates and is on the Juju Bean app: @DallasMomDaisy. My finger toggled over the message button. I posted the photo of Daisy in butterfly wings.

“I’m looking for someone very close to my heart. Does anyone recognize this girl, Daisy Laramie, last seen in Central Texas, but possibly living in California?”

Then I hit send.