Heather McGowan’s Friends of the Museum is a dense, clever, and emotionally rich novel that captures the beautiful chaos of institutional failure. Set within a prestigious New York City museum on the brink of reinvention—or collapse—it follows a cast of characters whose personal and professional lives unravel over a single day. With sharp humor and haunting insights, McGowan doesn’t just explore the museum’s inner workings—she dissects the fragile human scaffolding that holds it all together.
McGowan, best known for Schooling and Duchess of Nothing, has always had a knack for psychological interiority and unconventional narrative structures. In Friends of the Museum, she levels up: the entire book takes place over 24 hours, moving from office meetings and hallway encounters to kitchen breakdowns and private reckonings. The structure is tight, but the emotional scope is vast.
A Day in Crisis: What Happens (and Doesn’t)
From the moment Diane Schwebe, the museum’s director, receives a pre-dawn call about a potentially stolen artifact, the story is set in motion. But this isn’t a thriller. It’s a layered character study masquerading as a workplace farce.
As preparations for the museum’s gala unfold, Diane is faced with:
a legal crisis involving looted antiquities
an outbreak of food poisoning from the staff buffet
looming board discontent and internal politics
personal malaise she can’t quite name (but might be hormonal, existential, or both)
Interwoven with Diane’s arc are a half-dozen other stories: a chef melting down over rejected recipes, a head of security trying to preserve both art and her memory, a costume curator spiraling into self-sabotage, and a general counsel haunted by a secret he’s never confessed.
No one dies during the gala—but by morning, someone’s gone. Yet even that is less a twist than a symbol: the end of an illusion.
Diane Schwebe: The Eye of the Institutional Storm
Diane is an impeccable, ironic protagonist. McGowan presents her not as a villain or a hero but as a woman who has sacrificed everything for a job that may not love her back. She is precise, overextended, and increasingly untethered from her own life.
Diane’s leadership is not without cracks:
She micro-manages staff while emotionally avoiding her own husband.
She talks about “legacy” while burying scandals.
She wonders if the feeling in her stomach is food poisoning or an epiphany.
Through Diane, McGowan examines what it means to be a woman in power inside a crumbling institution. Her strength is undeniable—but so is her weariness.
An Ensemble of the Frazzled and Forgotten
Where McGowan excels most is in her ensemble cast. These aren’t just side characters—they’re alternate lenses through which to understand the museum as a living, groaning entity.
Shay Pallot, the head of security, is perhaps the most poignant. Quietly suffering from memory loss, Shay scribbles down fragments of her past in a notebook—trying to hold on to the story of her life before it slips.
Nikolic, the overworked chef, is manic with ambition and frustration. His insomnia-fueled kitchen disasters and internal tirades show how creativity can curdle into obsession when validation is always just out of reach.
Katherine, the costume curator, writes letters to her aunt about shaving her head, toxic family dynamics, and crackers for dinner. Her sections are simultaneously hilarious and achingly sad.
Henry Joles, the museum’s legal counsel, is the bitter voice of institutional memory—once a mover and shaker, now more ghost than guide.
Each voice adds texture and pressure to the novel’s compressed timeline. Together, they form a collage of people holding onto their roles like relics—uncertain if the structure they serve is worth saving.
The Writing: Fragmented, Funny, and Ferociously Observant
McGowan’s prose is its own ecosystem. Sentences stretch long and tumble with interruptions, doubts, and inner arguments. The style mimics the overwhelmed mind: constantly ticking, ricocheting between memory and impulse, dread and duty.
Key stylistic features:
Fragmented internal monologues that spiral into panic or poetry
Run-on dialogue that overlaps like corporate jazz
Observational humor that never tries too hard—dry, biting, effortless
Moments of stillness that punctuate the frenzy with startling emotional clarity
This writing style may alienate some readers. It requires presence and patience. But for those willing to sit with the rhythm, it offers something rare: a voice that feels genuinely alive, not engineered.
Big Ideas Beneath the Banter
Though often laugh-out-loud funny, the novel grapples with weighty subjects—some cultural, some painfully intimate.
Major Themes:
Institutional decay: Museums, like other relics of cultural authority, must justify their existence. McGowan asks: what happens when their values become outdated?
Cultural ownership: The Shiva statue scandal reveals how museums have historically laundered theft into “preservation.”
Invisible labor: Assistants, interns, cooks—those who keep the place running are also the most disposable.
Aging and obsolescence: Nearly every character, from Diane to Shay to Henry, wonders if they’ve passed their expiration date—professionally or personally.
What elevates the novel is its refusal to offer resolution. There are no neat conclusions. Just accumulated stress, incremental shifts, and small, private reckonings.
Where the Novel Triumphs
There’s much to admire in Friends of the Museum. McGowan is a master of discomfort and nuance.
Authentic workplace atmosphere: From scheduling chaos to political tightropes, it’s a near-perfect satire of modern professional life.
Human complexity: Characters are inconsistent, insecure, often unlikeable—and thus deeply human.
Sense of place: The museum is not just a backdrop—it breathes, heaves, and decays like a character in its own right.
Emotional sharpness: McGowan doesn’t overexplain. She trusts readers to catch the tremors beneath the banter.
Where It Slips
For all its brilliance, the novel doesn’t always hold itself together.
Too many characters: With a cast this large, not all voices feel distinct. Some storylines fade before they gain traction.
Pacing drag: The middle third spins its wheels. Scenes blur into one another, and stakes become muddled.
Stylistic density: While immersive, the prose occasionally becomes so tangled it obscures meaning.
Low narrative payoff: The climactic death, hinted at from the start, lands with a whimper rather than a bang.
Readers looking for traditional resolution or plot mechanics may feel underwhelmed. This book is less about what happens than how people unravel under the weight of expectation.
Similar Titles Worth Exploring
If Friends of the Museum intrigues you, you might also enjoy:
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel – another character-driven mosaic with overlapping lives and artistic pressure
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – for its dry absurdity and sharp emotional detachment
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma – metafictional, fragmented, and full of quiet chaos
Weather by Jenny Offill – a novel of existential dread written in collage form, much like McGowan’s approach
These books share McGowan’s fascination with impermanence, identity, and the absurdity of modern life.
Should You Step Inside This Museum?
Friends of the Museum by Heather McGowan is not a fast read. It’s not clean, nor kind, nor neatly resolved. But it’s an incisive, often hilarious, and occasionally devastating look at the emotional labor of modern institutions—and the fragile people who uphold them.
This is literary fiction in its truest form: asking more questions than it answers, finding the sublime in the mundane, and trusting the reader to assemble meaning from shards.
If you enjoy layered character studies, disjointed timelines, and stories about professional spaces that double as emotional battlegrounds, this book will reward your attention.