Excerpt from The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But tonight, books were unseductive, and so they remained untouched, ignored. Tonight college was only about partying, or sitting in a bland dormitory lounge, bookless and self-punishing. Bitterness, she knew, could give you an edge. Unlike pure unhappiness, bitterness had a taste. This display of bitterness would be for no one but herself. Her parents wouldn't witness it; even Cory Pinto, down at Princeton, wouldn't. She and Cory had grown up together, and had been in love and entwined since the year before; and though they'd vowed that throughout the four years of college they would Skype with each other all the time and borrow cars to visit each other at least once a month, they wouldn't be Skyping anymore tonight. He had gotten dressed in a good sweater and gone out to a party. Earlier, she'd watched as the Skype version of him came close to the screen, all pore and nostril and rock ledge forehead.

"Try to have a good time," he'd said, his voice stuttering slightly because of a glitchy system configuration. Then he turned and held up a finger to John Steers, his off camera roommate, as if telling him: Give me two more seconds. I just have to deal with this.

Greer had quickly ended the call, not wanting to be seen as "this"—someone to deal with, the needy one in the relationship. Now she sat in the Woolley lounge, lowering and lifting her hand into and out of the popcorn, looking around at the tacked up posters for the Heimlich maneuver and indie band auditions and a Christian Students picnic in West Quad, come rain or shine. A girl walked by the room and stopped; later on she admitted that she had done this more out of kindness than interest. She resembled a slender, sexy boy, perfectly made, with a Joan of Arc aesthetic that immediately read as gay. She took in the sight of the bright room of lost people, frowned in deliberation, and then announced, "I'm going to check out a few parties, if anyone wants to come."

The boy shook his head and returned to the image on his screen. The girl with the popcorn just kept eating, and the girl in distress was now debating with someone on her cell phone about whether or not she should go to Health Services. "I know that on the plus side they could help me," she was saying. "But on the minus side I have no idea where they're located." Pause. "No, I cannot call Security and have them escort me there." Another pause. "And anyway, I think it might just be nerves."

Greer looked at the boyish girl and nodded, and the girl nodded back, turning up the collar of her coat. In the dim hall, they pushed through the heavy fire doors. Only when Greer was outside in the wind, feeling it ripple along the thin material of her shirt, did she remember she was coatless. But she felt certain that she shouldn't break the moment by asking if she could run up to the third floor and get her coat.

"I thought we could sample a few different things," said the girl, who introduced herself as Zee Eisenstat, from Scarsdale, New York. "It will be like a test kitchen for college life."

"Exactly," said Greer, as though this had been her plan too.

Zee led them to Spanish House, a freestanding clapboard building on the edge of campus. As they walked in, a boy in the doorway said, "Buenas noches, señoritas," and handed them glasses of what he called mock sangria, though Greer got into a brief conversation with another resident of the house about whether the mock sangria was perhaps actually not mock at all.

"Licor secreto?" Greer asked quietly, and the girl looked at her hard and said, "Eres inteligente."

Eres inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and then she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her class.

Excerpted from The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer. Copyright © 2018 by Meg Wolitzer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.