Friends of the Museum
By Heather McGowan
Washington Square Press, April 15, 2025
Coworkers at a legendary but troubled New York City museum struggle with issues large and small over the course of one extraordinary day in this whip-smart “marvel” (Mona Awad, bestselling author of Bunny) of a novel in the vein of The White Lotus.
When Diane Schwebe, the director of a major New York museum, is awakened in the early morning by a text message from the museum’s lawyer, it is the start of a twenty-four-hour roller-coaster ride.
Diane has sacrificed many things in her life to help the fading institution stave off irrelevance and financial ruin. In this battle, she’s surrounded by her stalwart supporters: her enigmatic and tireless personal assistant, Chris; the museum’s trusty head of security, Shay; and its general counsel, Henry—a man whose ability to weasel his way out of a jam is matched only by his capacity to avoid learning anything from the experience.
Orbiting Diane is a motley assortment of museum employees, each on the precipice of collapse or revelation: among them a line cook staring down a huge opportunity he’s not sure he wants; a costume curator stuck in an inescapable rut; and the ambivalent curator of the museum’s film program, whose first day on the job might very well be his last.
On this day of the museum’s annual gala, every plate that Diane has kept spinning will fall—and by daybreak, someone will be dead.
Wise, surprising, and darkly funny, Friends of the Museum is a kaleidoscopic tragicomedy that surges along to the unstoppable tick of the clock, leaving you on the edge of your seat until the final second.
Praise for Friends of the Museum
“Friends of the Museum is a marvel. I devoured this novel with such pleasure and finished with chills, dazzled by its sheer life. I’m in awe of Heather McGowan’s virtuosic talent. The depth of her compassion, her sharp eye and wry humor and, above all, her peerlessly rich and brilliant imagination that can conjure all of life, its singular, jangly wonder, in a day at the museum. One of my favorite novelists writing today.” –Mona Awad, bestselling author of Rouge and Bunny
Praise for Schooling and Duchess of Nothing
“Stunningly beautiful, earnest and aching and astonishing and sad… The most haunting novel of the year.” –Detroit Free Press, on Schooling
“Mesmerizing… Does a dazzling job of conveying the hormonal impatience and doomy romanticism of adolescence.” –The New York Times, on Schooling
“A thrilling, crystalline novel of adolescent consciousness, a brilliantly unflinching marriage of lyricism and erudition, a book which, like the best books, contains a whole, urgent, and unforgettable world.”
–Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, on Schooling
“You must get to this book… Read it. Wonder. Marvel. McGowan is a stylist with few peers. You will quote sentences for the rest of your days.”
–Detroit Free Press, on Duchess of Nothing
“Strange and startling…beautiful and jagged, immensely comic and oddly moving.”
–People, on Duchess of Nothing
“Part Holly Golightly, part Auntie Mame, part Eloise all growed up…this woman without a name is so marvelous, so wise and ditzy, so committed to the pure spirit of this abandoned boy that you cannot help but fall utterly in love with her.”
–Los Angeles Times, on Duchess of Nothing
“An engrossing, entertaining book… [McGowan] beautifully characterizes her unnamed protagonist in a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious.” –San Francisco Chronicle, on Duchess of Nothing
“Imagine Mary Poppins with a heavy dose of Sylvia Plath... [The book has] a sneaky irresistible charm.” –The New York Times Book Review, on Duchess of Nothing
“If you took one of Dostoevsky’s existentially rebellious characters and spliced in the kind of eloquent quirkiness you’d find in Oscar Wilde, you might approximate this oddball individual invented by McGowan… The narrator of Duchess of Nothing is truly an extraordinary character.” –Newsday, on Duchess of Nothing
“Duchess of Nothing recalls Robert Browning’s wonderful dramatic monologues of the 19th century. McGowan writes sharp, observant prose.”
–Seattle Times, on Duchess of Nothing
About the Author
Heather McGowan is the author of Friends of the Museum, Schooling, and Duchess of Nothing. Schooling was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, the Detroit Free Press, and the Hartford Courant. McGowan received an MFA from Brown University and has been awarded the Rome Prize in Literature and the Berlin Prize Fellowship for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin.
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