The Narrative Pleasures of Social Discomfort: A Reading List of School Reunion Stories

The question of whether to attend a college reunion is often met with mixed emotions—nostalgia, curiosity, a healthy dose of apprehension. What will it feel like to go back to the campus of our youth? How will our lives compare to our classmates’? Which parts of our old selves might get dredged up?

If a reunion is about reconnecting with the past, it also invites reflection on how things have changed. It’s a return to a time when we didn’t know yet where our lives would take us. A return to a place that feels familiar though we are inevitably different. It’s a return to people who knew us then but may now be strangers. (I’ve watched the classic college reunion movie The Big Chill more times than I can count but will always be moved by the line: “A long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”)

In fiction, this combination of comfort and discomfort offers deep narrative pleasures. There’s an inherent drama in gathering a group of people with a shared past in a shared present—whether muddling through their twenties or navigating midlife or approaching older age—and the slow reveal of their collective history. There’s the tension between who we were then, who we are now, and who we imagined we’d become.

In my new novel, Reunion, three friends return to their small college in Maine for the twenty-fifth college reunion that was canceled, as mine was, in 2020. Polly, Hope, and Adam all carry with them fragile, untested feelings around re-entering the world one year later. They carry personal baggage too—the stress of a strained marriage, concern over struggling kids, exhaustion after a year of online teaching—as well as complicated feelings around their shared past.

Here are eight novels that explore the complexities of reunions—with classmates from college and high school, close friends or near strangers, and former versions of ourselves.

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Mary McCarthy, The Group

McCarthy’s iconic novel about eight 1933 Vassar graduates, known as “the group,” opens with the friends convening at the wedding of Kay Strong one week after graduation. What follows is an intimate deep dive into the individual journeys of these women as they embark on life in New York City—an intense portrait of their interiors and a captivating, often searing picture of the larger world—before, unexpectedly, the group reunites again.

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

In Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, a forty-fifth high school reunion is the framing device by which Nathan Zuckerman confronts the past. It arrives in the form of old friend Jerry Levov, whose brother Seymour was a beloved high school athlete and embodiment of the American dream.

Hearing that “the Swede” has died is the impetus for Zuckerman to narrate the richly layered story—part fact, largely fiction—of his former idol’s tragic rise and fall.

Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

It’s not about a reunion per se, but it is about comparing oneself to peers from high school—in this case, the former classmates of Lewis Miner who, subverting the traditionally glowing alumni update, determines to tell it like it really is: “I did not pan out.” Through a series of witty letters to the class newsletter, Catamount Notes, Lipsyte’s smart, sharp novel exposes the difference between the prettified, polished success stories and life as truly lived.

Steven Rowley, The Celebrants

Five old friends from Berkeley—including a gay couple, the Jordans—have a unique pact. After their friend Alec died of an overdose just before graduation, they resolved that if ever one of the remaining five were in crisis, the group would gather for a living “funeral” to celebrate them.

The poignant story alternates between funerals past and present, in which the group is embarking on their fifties, and one of the Jordans has devastating news.

Elizabeth Berg, The Last Time I Saw You

Berg’s Talk Before Sleep is a novel that gutted me when I first read it—a spare, unsentimental story of adult friendship, midlife, and mortality. Here, Berg revisits these themes through a different lens: a fortieth high school reunion in the Midwest told from the points of view of five returning classmates.

For each, the reunion promises something different—escape, salvation, a second chance—but ultimately compels them to look inward.

Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon

The protagonist of Varela’s debut is Andrés, a gay Latinx professor who, reeling from a marital crisis, returns to his suburban hometown to care for his ailing father. It’s his reluctant attendance at his twentieth high school reunion that leads to a series of reckonings—with an old friend, a first love, the hierarchies and hypocrisies that shaped his working-class community—in a story that’s equal parts compelling personal journey and incisive social critique.

Susan Choi, Trust Exercise

It isn’t a conventional reunion novel, but that’s in keeping with everything else about this brilliantly twisty, genre-bending book. We open on Sarah and David, students at a performing arts high school, falling in love—a narrative that’s upended when Sarah’s friend Rachel interrupts to assert it was written by Sarah and misrepresents what happened.

Twenty years later, Rachel reconnects with her former classmate and two ex-drama teachers, armed with a very different story of their high school years.

Rona Jaffe, Class Reunion

Like Jaffe’s sensational first book—The Best of Everything, about five women at a 1950s publishing company—Class Reunion is a juicy page-turner and eye-opening snapshot of the social conventions of its time. The novel opens in 1979, at the twentieth reunion of four Radcliffe grads, then rewinds to the start of college two decades prior.

Though some material may be jarring to a modern reader, the novel chronicles the changing world of the sixties and seventies, before the women return, with conflicted feelings, to the place where it all began.

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Reunion by Elise Juska is available via Harper.