The Authenticity Project: The feel-good novel you need right now

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Her plan is to weasel him out of his cave by advertising for an artist to teach drawing at her café. Hazard is an interesting character in that he’s a really obnoxious on the one hand, but has the self-awareness to take himself off on a retreat to Thailand to detox. Clare's dark but hilarious memoir, The Sober Diaries, has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how little people really know one another anymore. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection.

It's a story about being brave and putting your real self forward--and finding out that it's not as scary as it seems.I guess this is chick-lit, so I looked at the only other such book I reviewed, nearly 14 years ago, Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret?

What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. It came close with Alice, who realises her brand “was all about authenticity”, but knows her posts paint sunny lie after sunny lie. All characters had their flaws and were unlikable, a while I appreciate how they weren't black and white, I also found them annoying.

We can often perceive people wrongly as just like social media, people can put on a front and no one really knows what is going on underneath. Though the story starts slowly, it definitely picks up, even offering an unexpected and solid twist ending. Each character has their story to tell and their own authentic selves to share which they do through a notebook. One of Julian's self-portraits had hung for a brief period in the National Portrait Gallery, in an exhibition titled The London School of Lucian Freud. Then, as soon as he was gone, about ten minutes later, she doubled back so that she could read the words on the gravestone.