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

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there—your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were—both exhausted and frightened Greer, and she thought of this as she and Zee headed for their next social destination, the Lamb Art Studio. How Zee, a freshman, knew about these parties was unclear; there had been no mention of them in the Ryland Weekly Blast.

The air in the studio was sharp with turpentine, which almost served as a sexual accelerant, for the art students, all upperclassmen, seemed unusually attracted to one another. They were twinned and tripled, with skinny bodies and paint spattered pants and drawn on hands and ear gauges and unusually bright eyes. In the middle of the white wooden floor, a girl was being carried around on a guy's shoulders, crying, "BENNETT, STOP IT, I'M GOING TO FALL OFF AND DIE, AND THEN MY PARENTS WILL SUE YOUR VISUAL ARTS ASS!" He—Bennett—carried her in staggered circles while he was still sufficiently young and powerful and Atlas like to hold her like this, and while she was still light enough to be held.

The art students were into one another and one another only. It was as if Greer and Zee had stumbled upon a subculture in the clearing of a forest. "The male gaze" kept getting mentioned, though at first Greer heard it as "the male gays," but then finally she understood. She and Zee slipped away not long after arriving, and once outside again they were almost immediately joined by another freshman who confidently and unapologetically attached herself to them. She said her name was Chloe Shanahan, and she seemed to aspire toward a certain mallish brand of hotness, with spiky heels and Hollister jeans and a Slinky load of thin silver bracelets. She had wound up in the art studio by mistake, she told them; she was actually looking for Theta Gamma Psi.

"A frat?" Zee said. "Why? They're so disgusting."

Chloe shrugged. "They apparently have a keg and loud music. That's all I need tonight."

Zee looked at Greer. Did she want to go to an actual frat party? She wanted it less than most things; but she also didn't want to be alone, so maybe she did want it. She thought of Cory leaning against a wall at a party right this minute, laughing at something. She saw an array of people looking up at him—he was the tallest person in any room—and laughing back.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24 hour supermarket in the middle of the night.

The Ryland website showed a few nominal photos of students in goggles doing something with a torch in a laboratory, or squinting over a whiteboard jammed with calculations, but the rest of the photos were social, cornball: an afternoon of ice skating on a frozen pond, a classic "three in a tree" shot of students chatting beneath the nexus of a spreading oak. In fact, the campus only had one such tree, which had been over photographed into exhaustion. In daylight, students straggled to class along the paths of the inelegant campus, frequently wearing pajamas under their jackets, like the members of a good natured bear family in a children's book.

When nighttime fell, though, the college came into its own. Their destination tonight was a large, corroding frat house thundering with sound. Greek life, the college catalogues had called this. Greer imagined IMing Cory later, writing, "greek life: wtf? where is aristotle? where is baklava?" But suddenly their usual kind of shared, arch commentary that kept them both entertained was irrelevant, for he wasn't here, not even close, and now she was inside a wide doorway with these two randomly chosen girls, heading toward the noxious smells and the inviting ones, and, indirectly and eventually, toward Faith Frank.

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.