The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

Six young people meet in a camp in upstate New York designed to encourage the artist in each of them.  Some are rich, some try to hide that they are on scholarship.   Some are damaged by the lose of family and some by family fame.  For three summers they form a friendship that embraces all of what they are and call themselves the "interestings."  They grow up - have families - experience success and tragedy.  For Jules (aka Julie), her reference point is always the people they were during those summers.  As drawn into their lives as the reader is, there are times where you wonder where this story is going until at the very end Wolitzer observes that life in general is"...a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and generosity and failure and success, a strange and endless loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting."