Something Borrowed/Something Blue by Emily Giffin

My first experience with Emily Giffin was her book Something Blue (I read the books out of order!). The main character of the book is named Darcy. She's a girl who is very full of herself and has a tendency to continually reinforce her superiority to her friends. She does it subtly, passive aggressively. I found her to be whiney and obnoxious and self-absorbed. The world spins for Darcy.

Imagine her surprise when she finds her best friend (who is obviously not as pretty as Darcy) in bed with her fiancee. Nobody has ever questioned her superiority before, and now she has been slapped in the face with the fact that her fiancee has chosen her friend over her. Immediately, she starts spreading the news about what a horrible person her best friend and fiancee are. Nevermind that Darcy herself has been sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend and has gotten pregnant with his child just weeks before her wedding is supposed to take place.

Something Blue is told with Darcy's voice. She puts her spin on all of the events. She makes her own transgressions out to be miniscule while she magnifies the transgressions of others--and she almost made me feel sorry for her.

Something Borrowed tells the same story, but through the voice of Rachel, Darcy's best friend. Darcy and Rachel committed the same wrongs against eachother. The major difference between them is in their reactions to the circumstances. Darcy makes haste to tell all of her friends and family what a bad person Rachel is (conveniently leaving out the part about her own pregnancy with another man's child). Rachel takes the brunt of the blame. She's angry about being made out to be the only bad guy in the situation, but we don't see her really fight back. She's at a place in her life where she doesn't need peoples' validation. She's finally at a point where Darcy's opinion doesn't matter anymore.

I thought it was creative of Giffin to write the same story with two different viewpoints. There are some lessons to be learned from this:

1. There's more than one side to every story.
2. We aren't always objective when we tell people about events that we have emotional attachments to.
3. There's good and bad in everyone, and some shades of gray in between.