Alessandra Montalto / New York Times News Service"Friendship" by Emily Gould

“Friendship”by Emily Gould (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 258 pgs. $26)

“Overshare” was chosen by Webster’s New World Dictionary as the “word of the year” in 2008, and no one overshared more that year than the blogger Emily Gould.

In a very long, often very irritating cover article for The New York Times Magazine that May, Gould — a former editor at Gawker and a compulsive personal blogger (“Emily Magazine,” “Heartbreak Soup”) — wrote about her almost biological impulse to post her thoughts and experiences online. She wrote about writing about a boyfriend who didn’t want to be written about. She wrote about writing about “the symptoms and probable causes of a urinary tract infection.” She wrote about writing about sometimes wanting to kill her mother. (“The thing that keeps her alive is how incredibly sad I would be if she died.”) She wrote about the nasty comments posted about her by others — who regarded them as a kind of “karmic comeuppance” for her own aggressive violations of other people’s privacy — and she wrote about trying to become a recovering blogger.

The magazine article elicited more than 1,200 comments, many of them dismissive or disgusted — with both her and The Times. One reader referred to her as a “snarky little trollop.” Another wrote: “Wah … wah … wah … I need attention … I’ve tattooed myself … now I relentlessly blab on my blog … PLEASE pay attention to me! PLEASE!!!”

In Gould’s awkward but often sharply observed first novel, “Friendship,” Amy, one of the two heroines, shares some biographical details with Gould’s much-chronicled earlier self and she also shares some traits Gould has been accused of embodying.

Amy once had a “great job” at a site “mocking New York City’s rich, powerful, corrupt, ridiculous elite,” but goes “from being a rising star to being an untouchable in a matter of days.” Amy is vulnerable and amusing at times, but she can also be narcissistic, entitled, self-dramatizing, snide, self-pitying and frequently petty, prideful and envious. She is cast as Lucy, with her best friend, Bev, assigned the less fashionable role of Ethel.

Readers who aren’t busy comparing Amy with the Gould of blog infamy may find themselves comparing “Friendship” to two current television shows concerned with young women trying to make ends meet in Brooklyn while looking for love, meaning and sex in the city. “Friendship” is certainly more sophisticated and searching than CBS’s cartoonlike “2 Broke Girls.” But it doesn’t have the raw, original voice that Lena Dunham brings to HBO’s “Girls,” a complex series with a funny, visceral sense of the real.

Amy and Bev have just crossed a microgenerational line into their 30s, and there’s a self-conscious, faintly melancholy tone to “Friendship”: the girls’ sense of looking back on the turmoil (and, in Amy’s case, hubris) of their swiftly receding 20s with both alarm and nostalgia, worried that things are starting to add up, that the clock is ticking more loudly now, that the arithmetic of their lives is changing.

After quitting her latest job (at a small, struggling blog with a “modern Jewish angle,” located “not quite in Manhattan”), Amy finds herself worrying about being unemployed and homeless, though she does ask herself how “a destitute homeless person” could “be in possession of a Comme des Garçons wallet, a pair of Worishofer sandals, a fridge with Moroccan oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes in it”? Bev is worried about becoming a single mother after a disastrous one-night stand leaves her pregnant.

Depicting Amy and Bev in the third person gives Gould a measure of perspective on — and distance from — her characters, enabling her to depict their follies and foibles with a mixture of sympathy and humor. The novel form (or perhaps the editing process) also accentuates Gould’s strengths as a writer, while playing down the liabilities apparent in her logorrheic blogs. Whereas the blogs tended to create a self-portrait of the author as human word processor (automatically slicing, dicing and churning experience into prose), “Friendship” isn’t the simple spewing (or venting or whining or knee-jerk reacting) of an obsessive oversharer. Rather, at its best, it points to Gould’s abilities as a keen-eyed noticer and her knack for nailing down her ravenous observations with energy and flair.

Some readers may well ask why anyone should be interested in the minutiae of Amy’s and Bev’s daily lives (how Bev realizes that she is wearing a jacket and a skirt that “were slightly different shades of black,” how Amy passes the time “mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr, liking photographs of food and animals”), or the minute-by-minute fluctuations in their emotional temperatures. But then, something similar could be asked about the heroes in Nicholson Baker’s early novels — acclaimed for their detail and comic pointillism — which recount the momentous happenings during one man’s lunch hour (“The Mezzanine”) and one father’s afternoon giving his baby a bottle (“Room Temperature”).

A lot more eventually happens to Bev and Amy and, along the way, Gould holds a mirror to their meandering journey toward something resembling adulthood. The contrived plot of “Friendship” has a clichéd, chick-lit architecture, and there are some creaky, stage-managed events — like the introduction of an older, married woman named Sally as a potential adoptive mother for Bev’s unborn baby. Still, Gould does a credible job of evoking her two self-absorbed heroines’ daily existence, hoping that noncommittal boyfriends might turn into more perfect mates, hoping that terrible temp jobs are really temporary pit stops on the way to some sort of real vocation.

As for Gould, she seems intent with this book on rebooting her own career — not as a blogger, but as a novelist.