Elyssa Friedland Books in Order

Elyssa Friedland found her way to novels by taking a route through newspapers, college, and corporate law. At Yale University, she worked at the Yale Daily News and became managing editor in her junior year, spending five nights a week writing and editing late into the evening. She has said that Yale was where she first came to identify as a writer.

She went on to Columbia Law School and worked as a corporate lawyer for three years. Then she changed course and pursued writing full-time, turning a longtime goal into her everyday work.

The switch made room for the stories she wanted to tell.

Friedland's debut, Love and Miss Communication, follows Evie Rosen, a young New York lawyer who tries to step away from her phone, social media, and the constant hum of online life. It is a modern love story with a real question underneath: what changes when someone stops using a screen as a shield?

She turned to marriage in The Intermission, told through the alternating perspectives of Cass and Jonathan. Cass asks for a six-month separation, leaving both partners to face the secrets and disappointments they have avoided. The setup is awkward, funny in places, and tense in the way close relationships can be when nobody says the thing they mean.

Family messiness gives Friedland plenty to work with in The Floating Feldmans and Last Summer at the Golden Hotel. One places three generations on a birthday cruise; the other brings two longtime Catskills hotel-owning families together as a possible sale looms. Both use crowded settings, old grievances, and competing agendas to keep the emotional temperature rising.

Her later novels keep widening the circle. In The Most Likely Club, four friends revisit the ambitions attached to their high school superlatives at a reunion. Jackpot Summer asks what happens after three siblings win the lottery, only to find that money can magnify the problems already waiting at home.

Then she wrote a picture book about a nervous loose tooth.

The Museum of Lost Teeth, illustrated by Gladys Jose, sends Toothy from Liam's mouth to a busy new home with the Tooth Fairy. It is a lighter project, but it still centers on a character facing change, uncertainty, and a new version of belonging. That interest in people at turning points runs through Friedland's work, whether the cast is a couple, old friends, siblings, or a family on vacation.

Friedland has taught Yale's undergraduate course “Contemporary Novel Writing” for several years, and her shorter work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary outlets. She is also a founding member of Artists Against Antisemitism and contributed an essay to On Being Jewish Now. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children, and her favorite pastimes include Scrabble, Rummy Kub, Canasta, and jigsaw puzzles.