JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Bestselling author Jenny Jackson has written a coming-of-age story for those heading for middle age. "The Shampoo Effect," out today, is the story of a group of friends who have been together since childhood - a group that doesn't have much interest in changing anything about themselves or their lives and who, when they come together, return to the familiar patterns of their younger days. But their equilibrium is disturbed when one member of the group starts dating an outsider and gets another member pregnant. Author Jenny Jackson joins me now. Welcome to the program.
JENNY JACKSON: Thank you so much for having me.
SUMMERS: OK. So just tell us a little bit more about this group of friends. They live in this small, coastal town in Massachusetts. They've been together and entangled in each other's lives forever. They're sort of their own kind of chosen family. What is it that keeps them together?
JACKSON: They are the kind of close where, you know, they don't say, what are you doing later? They say, hi, I'm in your driveway. Or they remember what each other's parents wore for pajamas 'cause they slept over each other's houses so much when they were little. They are very much like brothers and sisters, except that some of them happen to be married to one another.
SUMMERS: I want to talk a little bit about the outsider, Caroline Lash. She's living in Greenhead for 18 months while she's doing this writing fellowship, and she starts dating a guy named Van. He's sort of the ultimate outdoorsman. And Van and Caroline - they seem happy together when they're alone. But what's it like when they get together with his friends?
JACKSON: So he sort of reverts back to the same person he was when he was a teenager. I think we're all familiar with the concept of going home for Thanksgiving and becoming our teenage selves.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JACKSON: And that's sort of what happens to him when he's around his friends.
SUMMERS: How would you describe Van for someone who hasn't read this book?
JACKSON: Van is a pure guy. His love language is acts of service. He will check the oil on your car. If you go for a walk on the beach, he's going to be picking up litter the whole way. He has gone away to college but returned home because he's an environmental scientist, and he has this amazing job preserving the beaches and dunes in their hometown. And that's actually kind of symbolic. He's the guy who wants to preserve things the way they always were.
SUMMERS: I wonder if you, Jenny, have a group of friends like that, who see you deeply but when you're together might let you get away with too much or return to a version of your earlier self that perhaps maybe you should have evolved beyond.
JACKSON: Well, I have had the same best friends since I was in middle school, and we, of course, all revert to our childhood selves together. For us, we tend to go back to a place where we're still our best selves, actually. So that's how I feel different from these characters in the book because when I'm with my friends from growing up, we really spend our time talking about books and music and all the stuff we loved as kids. I think this group is a little more drawn towards bad behavior when they're together - towards drinking and partying and gossiping and plotting and planning.
SUMMERS: Yeah. We talked earlier about the fact that Caroline and Van - they were really happy together, but then there is something really big and permanent that gets in the way, and that is Bailey's pregnancy. Let's talk about that a bit.
JACKSON: Yes. So Bailey and Van had been on again, off again, casually sleeping together, and they hadn't been sleeping together for two months. He started dating Caroline, and then Bailey learned that she is pregnant. She wants to have the baby. She's happy to have Van involved, but she doesn't want to be a couple with him.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JACKSON: And I think that we've all come to understand that a baby is a bomb that goes off in the middle of a marriage. But what happens when there's no marriage?
SUMMERS: Yeah.
JACKSON: It's a bomb that goes off in a friend group, and it catches everybody in the shrapnel.
SUMMERS: It changes everything. There is this scene where Caroline and Fran are talking about all of these big changes, and Fran is telling her that having children makes the vision you once had for your life so much murkier. What did you want to explore about how a child changes all of these different kinds of relationships?
JACKSON: I think that we all have really strong senses about the life that we want to live and the kind of person that we want to become. But once you have children and you're no longer living for yourself, you no longer have the time you want to do everything the right way. You can be this ardent environmentalist who's, all of a sudden, using disposable diapers. Just - your plans can't continue in the same way once you have a baby. And this is something that people really can't understand until it happens to them. And so as often as Caroline is warned about this, as often as Bailey is warned about this, they don't get it until the baby arrives.
SUMMERS: And we see in the book that Van and Caroline are really trying to make it work, but babies are permanent. It makes a lot of changes. It proves to be too much for their relationship. And I want to avoid spoilers, but the fallout from the breakup between Van and Caroline leads to just so much change and a good deal of conflict for everyone. Talk about why it took an outsider to really rock the boat to help this group of friends kind of grow up.
JACKSON: So I think that one of the things we all experience in our long-term friendships is that you have to sometimes sweep things under the rug. If you want to stay close to your childhood friends, you have to forgive. You have to forget. But Caroline comes and she sort of pulls all of these things into the sunshine, and she makes everybody acknowledge some of the secrets that they have been ignoring for as long as possible. And in doing so, she forces them to reckon with some of the really imperfect things in their relationships. But it takes somebody who has, really, no vested interest in keeping this group close to disrupt everything.
SUMMERS: Did you ever have to deal with a dynamic like this, where someone new comes into the picture and really shakes everything up?
JACKSON: I think that, inevitably, when you've been friends with people for a really long time, when you've grown up together, your lives look a lot alike, and then things start to change. Maybe somebody falls in love. Maybe somebody has a professional success. And the changes start to make you question yourself. And so I think that it's natural that you start to feel a little sort of resentful or jealous or conflicted about your friends who are having a different life. And then, over the course of time, you realize, like, OK, you did this first. I did this second. I did this first. You did that second. And it all evens out. But it does make for some speed bumps along the way.
SUMMERS: At the end of the day, if you take stock, do you think these long-term relationships - like the bond between the group of friends in your book - are they a good thing, a bad thing or just a way to get through life?
JACKSON: I think they are maybe the most important thing. One of the fascinating things about a close group of friends is, you know, we talk a lot about chosen family. When you have a family, there is a level of unconditional love there. There's the feeling that something would have to go terribly awry for a family member to stop speaking to you. That's not true with your friends. And when you're really close to people, they can know you better than your family. They know your secrets. They know your heartaches. And they can still decide to walk away from you.
And so part of having these strong, long-term friendships is being caring and really nurturing those friendships in a way that you don't have to nurture some of your other relationships. So I think that having these conditional and yet really intimate friendships makes us all better people.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Jenny Jackson. Her new novel is "The Shampoo Effect." She's also the author of the bestselling "Pineapple Street." Jenny, thank you.
JACKSON: Thank you.
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