Community and Friendship

The novel’s primary backdrop incites the narrative explorations of community and friendship. At the Biedermeier women’s hotel, a diverse network of women are brought together into the same living space. The setting symbolically represents community and offers its residents the chance to make connections in the city. Any woman who can “claim to occupy . . . [the] bracket of age between eighteen and thirty-four,” can “supply the real or merely plausible name of an employer,” and can pay “two weeks’ rent” up front is offered a room at the hotel (7). Women including Katherine, Josephine, Lucianne, J.D., Carol, Kitty, Gia, and Ruth all come from different backgrounds and have “descend[ed] on Manhattan” for different reasons (5). However, they all have things in common, too. The Biedermeier girls want a sense of security and belonging. Despite the difficulties of finding security in 1960s New York...