Amy Silverberg’s debut novel First Time, Long Time arrives with the promise of examining what happens when a young woman becomes entangled with a famous older man—and then, unexpectedly, with his daughter. The premise alone suggests the kind of tangled emotional terrain that makes for compelling fiction, but Silverberg’s execution proves both her greatest strength and most glaring weakness.
The novel follows Allison, a twenty-something aspiring writer teaching at a Los Angeles community college while moonlighting as a book club facilitator for wealthy Beverly Hills women. Still reeling from her brother’s sudden death two years prior, she drifts through life feeling perpetually displaced—until a chance encounter with Reid Steinman, a famous radio shock jock who was her father’s idol, pulls her into an intoxicating orbit of celebrity and desire.
A Voice That Cuts Both Ways
Silverberg, who holds a PhD from USC and has published in prestigious venues like The Paris Review and Granta, demonstrates considerable skill in capturing Allison’s sardonic, self-aware voice. The prose crackles with observations that feel both fresh and painfully accurate: “I took in every piece of news like it had been planned with only me in mind,” Allison notes, encapsulating the narcissistic spiral of grief and self-doubt that defines much of her journey.
The author’s background in stand-up comedy (she was selected as a “New Face” at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival) clearly influences her writing style. Silverberg excels at finding humor in darkness, much like her protagonist who teaches classes with quips like “I could prescribe a book for whatever ails you—I’m like a book doctor that way.” This comedic sensibility provides necessary levity to what could otherwise become an oppressively heavy narrative about loss, sexual identity, and the complications of desire.
The Reid Problem
Where the novel stumbles most significantly is in its portrayal of Reid Steinman, clearly inspired by Howard Stern (as Silverberg acknowledges in her acknowledgments). Reid never transcends his status as a thinly veiled celebrity caricature. While Silverberg succeeds in making him simultaneously charismatic and repulsive—a man who can be tender with Allison while engaging in degrading radio segments—he remains frustratingly opaque as a character.
The power dynamics at play feel underexplored. Allison’s attraction to Reid seems rooted more in his fame and her father’s approval than in any genuine connection, yet the novel doesn’t interrogate this dynamic with the depth it deserves. When Reid dismisses Allison’s book club work as beneath her talents—despite never having read her writing—it reveals a fundamental disrespect that the narrative acknowledges but doesn’t fully reckon with.
Emma: The Heart of the Matter
The novel finds its emotional center when Emma, Reid’s daughter, enters the picture. Emma is everything the book promises: sharp, funny, and magnetically complex. Her relationship with Allison develops with a naturalism that the Reid storyline lacks. Their text exchanges and late-night conversations feel authentic in ways that Allison’s interactions with Reid often don’t.
Silverberg writes Emma’s comedy career with insider knowledge, avoiding the tired clichés often associated with female comedians in fiction. Emma’s material about her divorced parents—where she never mentions her father’s fame—demonstrates Silverberg’s understanding of how comedy can serve as both armor and weapon. The scenes where Allison watches Emma’s stand-up videos repeatedly suggest an obsession that transcends mere sexual attraction.
The Weight of Grief
The novel’s strongest thread follows Allison’s ongoing struggle with her brother Jack’s death. Silverberg handles grief with remarkable honesty, avoiding both sentimentality and neat resolution. Jack appears throughout the narrative not as a saint but as a fully realized person whose absence creates a specific shape in Allison’s life.
The flashbacks to their shared experiences—particularly their work at a grief camp for children at Lake Tahoe—provide some of the book’s most moving moments. Silverberg’s depiction of how grief can make someone simultaneously numb and hypersensitive rings painfully true: “The grief had made my need impossible, an ever-deepening pit.”
Sexual Identity and Self-Discovery
As an LGBTQ+ narrative, the novel succeeds in portraying sexual fluidity as messy and non-linear. Allison’s discovery of her attraction to women doesn’t follow a tidy coming-out trajectory. Instead, Silverberg presents sexuality as one element in a larger pattern of self-discovery—complicated by grief, family expectations, and the desire for authenticity.
The novel’s approach to bisexuality feels refreshingly matter-of-fact. When Allison tells her childhood friend Marcella about her attraction to women, Marcella’s response—“Will it hurt your feelings if I don’t act surprised?”—suggests that others often see us more clearly than we see ourselves.
The Los Angeles Setting
Silverberg’s Los Angeles feels authentic and lived-in, from the community college where Allison teaches to the Korean spa where she has revelatory conversations with strangers. The city serves as more than backdrop; it becomes a character that reflects Allison’s emotional state. LA’s reputation as a place where people reinvent themselves mirrors Allison’s own attempts at transformation.
The book club scenes, featuring wealthy Beverly Hills women discussing literature while projecting their own anxieties, provide both comic relief and social commentary. These women, with their casual cruelty disguised as concern (“You’re a woman approaching thirty. Seeing’s not enough”), represent the societal pressure Allison feels to settle into conventional relationships.
Technical Craft and Pacing Issues
While Silverberg’s prose style generally serves the story well, the novel suffers from pacing problems that become more pronounced in its second half. The middle section, where Allison attempts to maintain relationships with both Reid and Emma, feels repetitive. The emotional stakes, while high for Allison, don’t translate into sufficient narrative tension for the reader.
The novel’s structure, jumping between time periods and perspectives, sometimes feels arbitrary rather than purposeful. Certain scenes—particularly those involving Allison’s parents—feel underdeveloped, as if Silverberg couldn’t decide how much space to give these supporting characters.
The Ending’s Complications
Without spoiling specific plot points, the novel’s conclusion attempts to wrap up multiple storylines in ways that feel both rushed and inevitable. Silverberg makes bold choices about her characters’ fates, but some of these choices feel driven more by plot mechanics than emotional truth. The final chapters sprint toward resolution in ways that don’t quite earn their emotional weight.
Literary Comparisons and Context
First Time, Long Time invites comparison to works by Emma Cline and Melissa Broder, as suggested by its marketing copy. Like Cline’s The Girls, it explores the dangerous allure of charismatic older figures and the ways young women can lose themselves in others’ narratives. However, where Cline maintains tight control over her narrative’s psychological realism, Silverberg’s novel feels more sprawling and less focused.
The book also recalls recent LGBTQ+ coming-of-age narratives like Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, though it lacks the stylistic innovation of the former and the sustained emotional depth of the latter.
Cultural Resonance and Timeliness
In an era of increased awareness about power dynamics in relationships, First Time, Long Time feels both timely and occasionally dated. The novel’s portrayal of Reid’s radio show—with its crude sexual content and casual misogyny—reads as a relic of a previous era, which may be intentional but creates tonal inconsistencies with the more contemporary elements of Allison’s story.
The book’s exploration of how famous men’s charisma can obscure their fundamental selfishness remains relevant, though Silverberg could have pushed this critique further.
Verdict: A Promising but Flawed Debut
First Time, Long Time succeeds as a character study of a young woman finding her voice and identity amid the wreckage of loss and desire. Silverberg’s writing demonstrates genuine talent, particularly in her ability to find humor in pain and her skill at creating authentic dialogue. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to offer easy answers about sexuality, grief, or the nature of authentic relationships.
However, the book’s structural problems and uneven character development prevent it from achieving the impact it clearly aspires to reach. Reid remains more symbol than person, and the novel’s pacing issues create momentum problems that persist throughout.
For readers interested in messy, honest portrayals of young women navigating complicated desires, First Time, Long Time offers enough insight and genuine emotion to justify the reading experience. It’s a novel that succeeds more in its individual moments than as a complete whole—much like its protagonist, who excels at observing life’s absurdities while struggling to create coherence from her own experiences.
Recommendations for Similar Reads
Readers who appreciate Silverberg’s blend of humor and pathos might enjoy:
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid – for its exploration of sexuality and fame
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson – for its nuanced family dynamics and coming-of-age elements
Real Life by Brandon Taylor – for its honest portrayal of desire and self-discovery
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer – for its examination of mentorship and power dynamics
Normal People by Sally Rooney – for its complex relationship dynamics and emotional authenticity
First Time, Long Time establishes Amy Silverberg as a writer worth watching, even if this particular effort doesn’t fully deliver on its considerable promise. Her next work will be worth anticipating, hopefully with tighter plotting and more fully realized secondary characters to match her evident gift for voice and emotional truth.