"With Friends Like You" by Amy Chozick voted the August book for Club Calvi
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Club Calvi has a new book to read for August!
Voters selected "With Friends Like You" as the Readers Choice.
In a video message to readers, author Amy Chozick said her debut novel is a psychological thriller about a new mom in Manhattan named Emily who is lost and lonely.
Emily decides that the answer to all of her problems is reconnecting to her former best friend, Daisy, who disappeared 15 years ago. Chozick says Emily falls into some dark rabbit holes trying to find Daisy.
You can read an excerpt and get "With Friends Like You" below to read along with Club Calvi. You can share your thoughts about the book with us when you join our Facebook group.
Club Calvi books are connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"With Friends Like You" by Amy Chozick
From the publisher: Emily is unmoored as a new mother in Manhattan—exhausted, broke, and slipping away from her well-meaning husband. She becomes fixated on finding the one person who ever truly understood her: her college roommate, Daisy. Cool, poetry-reading Daisy, who vanished years ago, after she took a job dancing at a strip club off campus.
In her desperate search, Emily tumbles from new-mom message boards into a world of sex work, secrets, and a high-end escort service for global billionaires, hitting one dead end after another. Until the unthinkable happens: Daisy suddenly reappears.
Daisy infuses Emily's life with newfound purpose and community as the two launch a new mothers' group in a vacant luxury skyscraper. But the joy of their reunion soon fades, revealing deep, unsettling cracks in their relationship. Is Daisy the key to Emily's happiness, or is she unraveling her world? And where has Daisy really been all these years?
Amy Chozick lives in Los Angeles.
"With Friends Like You" by Amy Chozick (ThriftBooks) $23
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Excerpt: "With Friends Like You" by Amy Chozick
IT DIDN'T TAKE MUCH to win over the Juju Bean moms. The facility was so plush, the childcare staff so overqualified and attentive, the organic diaper stash so plentiful, twenty minutes in and they were sold. By the end of week one, Sloane was saying "mommy" in two languages and had baked dairy‑free crème brûlée.
When Olivia picked Zoe and Chloe up, they were in embroidered onesies from that company that makes three‑hundred‑dollar cash-mere sweaters with feminist slogans.
I am not the kind of person who is into resistance cashmere, but Olivia clearly is, and that is the thing about 527 Park. Whatever kind of mom you are, we got you.
Daisy's condo, Apartment 8789, serves as our hub. The place where we check in each morning to get the day's affirmations. Daisy asked me to make a few remarks to welcome everyone. I moved to New York to do open mics, but I don't really do public speaking. I become cripplingly shy. But my glitchy postpartum brain is desperate to perform. To write poetry. For all the women looking up at me to think of me not as a crying heap on a toilet whose baby never latched but as someone who found meaning in all of our daily banalities. Someone to follow into the abyss.
Daisy appears behind me in a caftan, the silk enveloping her entirely, making her somehow look like a Saudi wife and a nudist. We check each other's breath. Hers is like warm mint and ten hours of sleep. Mine is . . . not great. She takes her spearmint gum out and puts it in my mouth. She gives me a nudge. A jolt at her fingertips on my skin. I look at her. If Daisy thought I could do it, then I could do it.
I recite a couple of affirmations, sticking to safe clichés at first. ("I am allowed to ask for help . . ." "I can miss who I was and still love who I am becoming . . ." "Motherhood didn't erase me. It expanded me.") The moms repeat the phrases halfheartedly.
Daisy has none of my hesitation. She has this ability to give herself entirely to the room. The muscle memory of a life spent exposed. As soon as she lifted a hand and spoke, whatever reservations some of the women had, whatever knot in the gut that said something didn't add up about this whole thing, melted away. By now, I'd heard her pitch a dozen times. It never got old.
"The sexual revolution was a fraud, perpetrated by men who wanted sex without consequences, dual incomes, and dinner on the table. We're a generation of women who watched our mothers try to be men. We're here to tell you it's a con. We were told to hustle. Well, you did. Poured your souls into LinkedIn profiles. Blink—your a** is thirty‑five and still too broke to procreate. You want to keep buying into their bull****? Or you want to burn it down? Say it with me."
Daisy looks out, her eyes spending time on each one of us, every type of mom, the full multiethnic spread of a Central Park play-ground on a September day, and we all repeat in unison, "To everything I've lost, thank you for setting me free."
The moms are all rapt. Daisy could say anything. Tell us to bathe in pesticides, microwave our Gerber baby oatmeal, breastfeed the devil, we'd do it. By then, nobody hesitates about signing the NDAs—that only adds to the sense that we get to be there at the beginning of a great experiment. We are the chosen people, creating a community based on compassion. Down there? They bleed us dry. Up here? We take something back. We just can't tell anyone about it, not yet.
Excerpted from With Friends Like You by Amy Chozick. Copyright © 2026 by Amy Chozick. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.