This is the best generational model I have read in a long time. Set in contemporary times, the characters were developed and had a breadth of range not often found. I could not put the story down once I started reading it. A very satisfying novel.

A beautifully written story that follows the lives of three people who have been friends since their early years, Charlie, Cece and Garrett. There is a wedding fairly early on, but Cece’s marriage to Charlie falls apart relatively soon after, and Cece marries Garrett. As the years pass and their lives change, and as the culture changes, the focus in this story includes climate change, how aging is affecting them, after they have managed to put the past behind them, they once again resume contact. As the years pass, even their children become friends. There were moments in this which were heartbreaking, but also felt timely as I thought about the increase in fires that we have been seeing over the years.

The story centers around Cece, a woman who's about to get married, but her heart is elsewhere. I won't lie, I was totally invested in her love triangle with Charlie and Garrett. Like, I was screaming at the pages, "Cece, what are you doing?!" But here's the thing: this book isn't just a romance. It's a deep dive into the human condition. Puchner explores the complexities of relationships, the pain of betrayal, and the beauty of impermanence. It's like he's holding up a mirror to our own lives, showing us the flaws and the beauty that make us human. What really got me was the way Puchner writes about the consequences of our choices. Cece's decisions have a ripple effect on the people around her, including her daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper. It's like Puchner is showing us that our choices aren't just about us; they're about the people we love, too. I'm still shaken from this book, to be honest. It's like Eric Puchner has left me with more questions than answers. But that's what makes "Dream State" so beautiful. It's a book that will stay with me for a long time, haunting me with its beauty and its sorrow.❤️‍🩹

Very disappointed that an Oprah Book Club pick is so underwhelming.. writing is ok, story line is lacking. Definitely not a book that “you can’t put down”.

I love multi-generational novels that grapple with secrets that spill down through the generations and have unintended consequences that ripple out over time. Even better when the main characters are of my era, born in the early 1970s, with all the cultural touch points of my own youth. From global issues like climate change to intimate issues like desire and regret, this novel had me from the beginning and kept me hooked until the end. I cared about all the characters, even knowing how things would likely end up for them. Puchner is a master of the short story form, and has proven his chops with this novel. Good pick, Oprah.

Characters and writing so alive, you forget you're reading. Frequently hilarious, utterly poignant, profoundly generous and wise, Puchner is in love with the humans he conjures even as he chronicles their missteps and conflicts. Dream State is a novel that reminds us of the many magical things novels are capable of doing better than any other form: using language to ensnare and transport us into worlds and lives that feel more real than our own (talk about VR!), while unfolding a story that ends up illuminating our own lives. Belongs on shelves alongside Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Strout, Jonathan Franzen, and Jennifer Egan.

What an amazing experience it was to read this book! Breathtakingly beautifully written. I couldn't stop reading and now I can't stop thinking of the lives of the characters... Really touching tribute to love, friendships, nature and human resilience.

There is something profoundly American about nostalgia, that strange compulsion to mythologize the past while knowing, deep down, that it was never quite as golden as we like to remember. It is this tension—between memory and reality, between the innocence we mourn and the disillusionment we acquire—that animates Dream State, Eric Puchner’s deeply felt, sharply observed collection of essays. Puchner, best known for his fiction, turns his attention inward here, offering a memoir-in-fragments that is equal parts personal history and cultural autopsy. The essays, anchored in his adolescence in Florida—a state that has long teetered between paradise and absurdity—are as much about the emotional landscapes of youth as they are about the literal ones. Florida, a place of contradictions where utopian visions are swallowed by sinkholes, serves as the ideal backdrop for Puchner’s meditations on coming of age in a world that never quite delivers on its promises. There is humor here, often of the self-deprecating variety, as Puchner revisits the earnest humiliations of youth—unwise crushes, doomed aspirations, the clumsy attempts to manufacture meaning in a life that has not yet acquired enough gravity to hold it. Yet beneath the wit lies something deeper, a quiet but persistent sense of loss. The essays function not just as recollections but as reckonings, confronting the ways in which time alters everything, including the narratives we tell ourselves about who we once were. Puchner’s prose is fluid and engaging, managing to be both literary and conversational, never indulging in the overwrought lyricism that plagues lesser memoirists. He writes with an awareness that nostalgia, unchecked, is a kind of vanity, but he also understands its necessity—the way it binds us to our younger selves, even as it distorts them. One of the collection’s triumphs is its ability to evoke a specific era—the humid, neon-lit strangeness of late-20th-century Florida—while also speaking to something universal. We have all, at some point, been trapped in our own dream states, caught between what we imagined our lives would become and what they have actually turned out to be. If there is a flaw in Dream State, it is that Puchner’s essays, for all their insight, sometimes lean too heavily on the wistful. The book is strongest when it resists the urge to romanticize the past and instead interrogates it with the sharp edge of hindsight. But this, one suspects, is part of the book’s intent—to show that even the most self-aware among us are not immune to the seductive pull of nostalgia. Ultimately, Dream State is not just a collection of personal essays but a study in memory itself: how it comforts, how it betrays, and how it shapes the stories we carry. Puchner has written a book that is at once tender and unflinching, a reminder that no matter how much we long for the past, it remains—as all dreams do—just out of reach.

Puchner asks out loud all the doubts and questions that exist in our heads as we progress through life! Brilliant writing!