Then Came You

May 16, 2011
Weiner (Best Friends Forever) revisits girls-are-their-own-best-friends territory with this savvy tale of a profoundly unorthodox family, unspooling the impossibly complicated and hopeful tale of how baby Aurora was born. The players: beautiful, lonely Princeton student and egg donor Jules, who uses the proceeds from selling her eggs to help save her drug-addled dad; surrogate Annie, a restless married mom-of-two trying to dig her way out of debt, a lifelong rivalry with her successful sister, and a marital rut; Bettina, India's step-daughter, who feels betrayed by her divorced parents and is desperate to rebuild the imagined happiness of her youth; and Aurora's legal mom, India, a gold digger who inadvertently falls in love with the man she married for money. Their individual paths to each other, and Aurora, are related in alternating chapters narrated by each woman, told with equal parts love and longingâwhether it be for a partner, a purpose, or a family. The men in their livesâin Jules's case, the womanâare inexplicably forgiving and disappointingly superfluous as the gals build a network and a modern village to raise the baby each of whom had a hand in creating.