The Girls from Ames
: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year FriendshipBy: Jeffrey Zaslow
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Gotham; Reprint edition (April 6, 2010)
*Copy provided by publisher for review on TLC Book Tours
The miracle of friendship, that special bond that transcends time and place. Sadly, often times, this gift is taken for granted or buried beneath the race and endless tug and pull of our lives. Every now and then there are exceptions to everything. One such exception is the story of eleven woman whose friendship and bond has withstood the test of time, sorrow, pain, joys and highs. Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana and Sheila. Eleven ordinary girls who form an extraordinary friendship that began in Ames, Iowa and continues far and wide. Each girl, unique in personality, talent and attitude, brings something special and unforgettable to their circle of close friendship.
The Girls from Ames is an incredibly special story, that will touch readers and stay with them long after the final page has been turned. Through the squabbles of high school, boy trouble, careers, marriages, children, catastrophic life changes, the reader will be taken on this amazing life journey with each girl as individuals as well as the unbreakable togetherness they share. Author Jeffrey Zaslow does a tremendous and commendable job in tapping into the female psyche and expressing, to the world, who these eleven wonderful woman are.
I have to admit that, for me, the biggest draw and reason that I wanted to read The Girls from Ames is simply because I am an Iowa girl as well. I have been through, and to, Ames, many times and the talk of corn fields, simplistic life, farms and the entire way of living is familiar. I was curious how it would play out and be portrayed within this book. However, after I began to read, the story became much more than the beginning location, but rather the personality and the depth of each of these girls. Mr. Zaslow makes it easy to get to know each one of them, to feel and care right along with them. Many of the experiences they went through together are familiar and resonate of the growing up years, the friendships. The fact that this relationship continues long after school and even the beginning of adult life is amazing, the fact, further, that this is such a vast group of girls who continue that friendship, is nothing shy of a miracle. Many of us go through life with several acquaintances, but only a handful of close and dear friends, even fewer can say that those friendships have lasted thirty, forty, plus years. What a treasure.
The Girls from Ames is a story that will remind readers of the importance of friends and being there for one another, no matter what. Life is never what we expect it to be, but with a close and stably support system, anything can be weathered. While reading, I was brought to tears, laughter, smiles and flashbacks of memories. I think that this is a wonderful book for any woman to read, it will warm the heart, tug at the heart strings and perhaps even move them to pick up that phone and give a friend or two a call. Also, what a perfect book to read together with a group of your friends. Whether you grew up together, formed a friendship years ago, or a new friendship, this is a book that will bring you closer together and inspire tales of early friendships to share, laugh and reminiscence. I have to also say that I loved the pictures of the girls throughout the book. This is a wonderful touch, that was both fun to see and shed further light on making each one more "real". I can't wait to see what the future holds for each one of these woman and I hope that the author will continue to do some sort of update, periodically, be it through the website or a future book.
*overall rating: 4/5
About The Girls from Ames:
The instant New York Times bestseller, now in paperback: a moving tribute to female friendships, with the inspiring story of eleven girls and the ten women they became, from the coauthor of the million-copy bestseller The Last Lecture.
As children, they formed a special bond, growing up in the small town of Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eighth different states, yet they managed to maintain an extraordinary friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, the death of a child, and the mysterious death of the eleventh member of their group. Capturing their remarkable story, The Girls from Ames is a testament to the enduring, deep bonds of women as they experience life’s challenges, and the power of friendship to overcome even the most daunting odds.
The girls, now in their forties, have a lifetime of memories in common, some evocative of their generation and some that will resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. The Girls from Ames demonstrates how close female relationships can shape every aspect of women’s lives-their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters-and reveals how such friendships thrive, rewarding those who have committed to them. With both universal events and deeply personal moments, it’s a book that every woman will relate to and be inspired by.
Check out the website for The Girls from Ames HERE.
Meet the girls and see all their photos HERE.
Excerpt:
Introduction
At first, they were just names to me.
Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny.
Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana.
Sheila.
They arrived, unheralded, in my email inbox one morning in June 2003. The email came from Jenny, who offered three understated paragraphs about her relationship with these women. She explained that they grew up together in Ames, Iowa, where as little girls their friendship flourished. Though all have since moved away — to Minnesota, California, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Massachusetts, Montana – they remain a powerful, loving presence in each other’s lives. Now entering their forties, Jenny wrote, they’re bonded by a lifetime of shared laughs, and by more than a few heartbreaking memories.
After I read Jenny’s email, I sent her a quick reply, thanking her for writing. Then I printed out her message to me, bundled it up with a couple hundred other emails I received that day, and put it in the bottom of a filing cabinet, where it remained untouched for three years.
Jenny had contacted me because I write a column for The Wall Street Journal called “Moving On.” The column focuses on life transitions, everything from a child’s first crush to a dying husband’s last words to his wife. Though the Journal covers the heart of the financial world, my editors have embraced the idea that we must also tend to the hearts of our readers. And so they’ve given me freedom to do just that. There are a thousand emotionally charged transitions that we all face in our lives, and most come without a roadmap. That’s the territory of my column.
Jenny decided to tell me about the girls from Ames (and yes, they still call themselves “girls”) after reading a column I’d written about the turning points in women’s friendships. The column focused on why women, more than men, have great urges to hold on tightly to old friends. Sociologists now have data showing that women who can maintain friendships through the decades are healthier and happier, with stronger marriages. Not all women are able to sustain those friendships, however. It’s true that countless grade-school girls arrange themselves in pairs, duos, threesomes and foursomes, vowing to be best friends forever. But as they reach adulthood, everything gets harder. Between ages 25 and 40, women’s friendships are most at risk, because those are the years when women are often consumed with marrying, raising children and establishing careers.
For that column, I spoke to women who had nurtured decades-long friendships. They said they felt like traveling companions, sharing the same point on the timeline, hitting the same milestones together – 30, 40, 50, 80. They believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend didn’t return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn’t mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from her day. Researchers who study friendship say that if women are still friends at age 40, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll be lifelong friends. “Female friends show us a mirror of ourselves,” one researcher told me.
That column ran in The Wall Street Journal on a Thursday, and by 5 a.m. that morning, emails from readers began filling my inbox. Every few minutes, well into the weekend, I’d get an email from yet another woman proudly telling me about her group of friends:
“We’ve gotten together twice a year ever since we graduated high school in 1939…”
“We met in Phoenix and call ourselves Phriends Phorever…”
“We’ve had lunch together every Wednesday since 1973…”
“My girlfriends and I joke that when the time comes, we’ll all just check into the same nursing home…”
“I’m only 23, but your article gives me hope that I will hold on to my friends for life…”
One reader told me about her grandmother’s eight friends, all from the class of ’89 – that’s 1889! They stayed remarkably close for 65 years, and even when they reached their eighties, they still called themselves “The Girls.”
And then there was the letter from Jennifer Benson Litchman, an assistant dean at the University Of Maryland School Of Medicine. Jenny from Ames.
In some ways, Jenny’s story was like so many of the others. She shared a few details about how the 11 Ames girls met, some as early as infanthood in the church nursery, and how they feel bonded forever. But her short, tossed-off note didn’t fully reveal how extraordinary those bonds have become — I’d learn all that later –and she didn’t even tell any of her friends she had written to me. Jenny ended her email by saying that she appreciated my take on female friendship. She also paid me a compliment: “You really seem to understand women. Your wife is very lucky indeed.”
My wife would have to speak to how lucky she is or isn’t, but I can say this: I do feel an almost urgent need to understand women. That’s mostly because I am the father of three teenagers, all daughters.
I have seen my girls pout and fret and cry over friendships in turmoil, and I have seen how their friends have buoyed them at their lowest moments. At times, their sweetest friends have turned into stereotypical mean girls. At other times, former mean girls turn into friends. As a parent witnessing it all, I often feel helpless and exasperated.
Having observed how my mother, sister and wife built lovely friendships over the years, I naturally hope that my daughters can be as fortunate. When I think about their futures, I want them to feel enveloped by people who love them, and I know they’ll need close, loving friends at their sides. (I’m also aware that men’s friendships are completely different. I’ve been playing poker with a group of friends every Thursday night for many years. About 80% of our conversations are focused specifically on the cards, the betting, the bluffing. Most of the rest of the chatter is about sports, or sometimes our jobs. For weeks on end, our personal lives – or our feelings about anything — never even come up.)
There have been many self-help books designed to help women find and navigate friendships. Scholarly books have been written, too. And, of course, best-selling novels have won huge audiences by focusing on the sisterhood among fictional women.
But as a journalist, I know there’s great power in honest stories about real people. So, over time, I found myself intrigued by the idea of asking one articulate group of longstanding friends to open their hearts and scrapbooks, to tell the complete inside story of their friendship. I had a real sense that a nonfiction narrative – the biography of a friendship, meticulously reported — could be a meaningful document for female readers. Perhaps it would also help me understand my daughters, my wife, and the other women in my life.
And so in the summer of 2006, I returned to that filing cabinet, and went through all the emails from women describing their friendships. I read them again, building a short stack of possibilities. I contacted many of the letter-writers, and they were all very eager to share their thoughts.
They told me that when women think about their friends, they find themselves pondering every part of their lives: their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their dependence on other women, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters…everything.
Many of these women shared beautiful anecdotes with me. They all said their friends could certainly fill a book. But once I called Jenny and spoke to her for a while, I had a sense that she and the 10 other girls from Ames had a sweeping and very moving story to tell. That was confirmed when I eventually met each of them. Born at the end of the baby boom, their memories are evocative of their times. Born in the middle of the country, they now live everywhere else, but carry Ames with them. Their story is universal, even common, and on that level it can’t help but resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. And yet some of their experiences together are so completely one-of-a-kind — haunting and touching and exhilarating – that I found myself feeling spellbound as they talked to me.
The Ames girls were intrigued by the idea of a book about them, but understandably, several were hesitant at first. It is not an easy decision to reveal your life to a journalist (and eventually to the world), and I tried to move slowly and respectfully with them. Turning their lives into an open book, I said, would be a journey for them and for me. I wanted to know vital details of their interactions, the good and the bad. I’d ask them about the times they showed each other great care and compassion. But I also wanted them to reflect on the times they disappointed each other, or were purposely unkind. How did they overcome those moments and remain so close for so long?
A few of them feared that my reporting for the book might bring up old ghosts, or highlight long-ago misdeeds, or challenge their assumptions about themselves. I asked them to take that risk with me. Yes, I hoped that the finished book would honor and strengthen their friendships. But I couldn’t guarantee that everything would go smoothly, and that no one would get hurt.
We began with tentative steps. One by one, often in long phone conversations after they tucked their kids into bed, they talked to me about their loving feelings for each other, the rougher times between them, and about how their story, if told well, could benefit other women of all ages. I decided to take a year-long leave from my job at the Journal, so I could travel around the country spending time with them. I immersed myself in their lives, asking them to think back, to think hard, to force themselves to remember everything as clearly and honestly as they could. Why did they choose each other? Who were they then and who are they now? They all turned out to be so articulate, so able to find perspective and broader truths. Because of that, compiling their story became a remarkable experience for me as a journalist.
As we got to know each other, the Ames girls became more comfortable with me. In time, they let me read hundreds of pages of secrets locked in their old diaries. They shared stacks of letters and emails they had exchanged. They introduced me to their parents, children, siblings, husbands and old boyfriends. They even pointed me toward women outside their group who saw them as a clique and didn’t much like them.
Born in 1962 and 1963, they spoke vividly about what it was like to be girls in the sixties and seventies, young women in the eighties, and new mothers in the nineties. They offered up countless examples of how close female friendships can shape every aspect of women’s lives.
Almost all of the Ames girls are scrupulous savers, chronicling their lives together in scrapbooks and photo albums, holding on to whatever memorabilia marked their friendship. That was a huge help in piecing together their story. Because I had their diaries, letters, concert-ticket stubs and notes passed in homeroom, I was able to track many of their interactions to the exact day and even the exact hour. I felt like an archeologist, sifting through crumbling prom corsages, looking for meaning.
Of course, there were plenty of challenges. When I’d tell people about this project, some wondered whether it was an appropriate task for a man. Could a man ever really understand women’s friendships? It was a fair point. And I admit that I sometimes asked the Ames girls questions that were silly, obvious or naïve. I’d catch them trading glances, and I knew that they were thinking: “This guy doesn’t get it, does he?” And yet, I also think that being a man gave me a wider canvas. I was often inquisitive in ways a female interviewer would not have been. I made no assumptions. I asked. I rephrased. I tried to comprehend. On some fronts, my outsider’s curiosity helped enrich the story you’re about to read.
In the end, the girls and I agreed that to make the project work, it had to be based on a great deal of trust between all of us. We worked to build that trust, interview by interview, recollection by recollection, sometimes with tears, sometimes with great laughter.
Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana, Sheila.
Theirs is the story of 11 little girls and the women they became. I feel privileged to have this opportunity to tell it.
At first, they were just names to me.
Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny.
Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana.
Sheila.
They arrived, unheralded, in my email inbox one morning in June 2003. The email came from Jenny, who offered three understated paragraphs about her relationship with these women. She explained that they grew up together in Ames, Iowa, where as little girls their friendship flourished. Though all have since moved away — to Minnesota, California, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Massachusetts, Montana – they remain a powerful, loving presence in each other’s lives. Now entering their forties, Jenny wrote, they’re bonded by a lifetime of shared laughs, and by more than a few heartbreaking memories.
After I read Jenny’s email, I sent her a quick reply, thanking her for writing. Then I printed out her message to me, bundled it up with a couple hundred other emails I received that day, and put it in the bottom of a filing cabinet, where it remained untouched for three years.
Jenny had contacted me because I write a column for The Wall Street Journal called “Moving On.” The column focuses on life transitions, everything from a child’s first crush to a dying husband’s last words to his wife. Though the Journal covers the heart of the financial world, my editors have embraced the idea that we must also tend to the hearts of our readers. And so they’ve given me freedom to do just that. There are a thousand emotionally charged transitions that we all face in our lives, and most come without a roadmap. That’s the territory of my column.
Jenny decided to tell me about the girls from Ames (and yes, they still call themselves “girls”) after reading a column I’d written about the turning points in women’s friendships. The column focused on why women, more than men, have great urges to hold on tightly to old friends. Sociologists now have data showing that women who can maintain friendships through the decades are healthier and happier, with stronger marriages. Not all women are able to sustain those friendships, however. It’s true that countless grade-school girls arrange themselves in pairs, duos, threesomes and foursomes, vowing to be best friends forever. But as they reach adulthood, everything gets harder. Between ages 25 and 40, women’s friendships are most at risk, because those are the years when women are often consumed with marrying, raising children and establishing careers.
For that column, I spoke to women who had nurtured decades-long friendships. They said they felt like traveling companions, sharing the same point on the timeline, hitting the same milestones together – 30, 40, 50, 80. They believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others. They had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from each other, but not constant attention. If a friend didn’t return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn’t mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from her day. Researchers who study friendship say that if women are still friends at age 40, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll be lifelong friends. “Female friends show us a mirror of ourselves,” one researcher told me.
That column ran in The Wall Street Journal on a Thursday, and by 5 a.m. that morning, emails from readers began filling my inbox. Every few minutes, well into the weekend, I’d get an email from yet another woman proudly telling me about her group of friends:
“We’ve gotten together twice a year ever since we graduated high school in 1939…”
“We met in Phoenix and call ourselves Phriends Phorever…”
“We’ve had lunch together every Wednesday since 1973…”
“My girlfriends and I joke that when the time comes, we’ll all just check into the same nursing home…”
“I’m only 23, but your article gives me hope that I will hold on to my friends for life…”
One reader told me about her grandmother’s eight friends, all from the class of ’89 – that’s 1889! They stayed remarkably close for 65 years, and even when they reached their eighties, they still called themselves “The Girls.”
And then there was the letter from Jennifer Benson Litchman, an assistant dean at the University Of Maryland School Of Medicine. Jenny from Ames.
In some ways, Jenny’s story was like so many of the others. She shared a few details about how the 11 Ames girls met, some as early as infanthood in the church nursery, and how they feel bonded forever. But her short, tossed-off note didn’t fully reveal how extraordinary those bonds have become — I’d learn all that later –and she didn’t even tell any of her friends she had written to me. Jenny ended her email by saying that she appreciated my take on female friendship. She also paid me a compliment: “You really seem to understand women. Your wife is very lucky indeed.”
My wife would have to speak to how lucky she is or isn’t, but I can say this: I do feel an almost urgent need to understand women. That’s mostly because I am the father of three teenagers, all daughters.
I have seen my girls pout and fret and cry over friendships in turmoil, and I have seen how their friends have buoyed them at their lowest moments. At times, their sweetest friends have turned into stereotypical mean girls. At other times, former mean girls turn into friends. As a parent witnessing it all, I often feel helpless and exasperated.
Having observed how my mother, sister and wife built lovely friendships over the years, I naturally hope that my daughters can be as fortunate. When I think about their futures, I want them to feel enveloped by people who love them, and I know they’ll need close, loving friends at their sides. (I’m also aware that men’s friendships are completely different. I’ve been playing poker with a group of friends every Thursday night for many years. About 80% of our conversations are focused specifically on the cards, the betting, the bluffing. Most of the rest of the chatter is about sports, or sometimes our jobs. For weeks on end, our personal lives – or our feelings about anything — never even come up.)
There have been many self-help books designed to help women find and navigate friendships. Scholarly books have been written, too. And, of course, best-selling novels have won huge audiences by focusing on the sisterhood among fictional women.
But as a journalist, I know there’s great power in honest stories about real people. So, over time, I found myself intrigued by the idea of asking one articulate group of longstanding friends to open their hearts and scrapbooks, to tell the complete inside story of their friendship. I had a real sense that a nonfiction narrative – the biography of a friendship, meticulously reported — could be a meaningful document for female readers. Perhaps it would also help me understand my daughters, my wife, and the other women in my life.
And so in the summer of 2006, I returned to that filing cabinet, and went through all the emails from women describing their friendships. I read them again, building a short stack of possibilities. I contacted many of the letter-writers, and they were all very eager to share their thoughts.
They told me that when women think about their friends, they find themselves pondering every part of their lives: their sense of themselves, their choice of men, their dependence on other women, their need for validation, their relationships with their mothers, their dreams for their daughters…everything.
Many of these women shared beautiful anecdotes with me. They all said their friends could certainly fill a book. But once I called Jenny and spoke to her for a while, I had a sense that she and the 10 other girls from Ames had a sweeping and very moving story to tell. That was confirmed when I eventually met each of them. Born at the end of the baby boom, their memories are evocative of their times. Born in the middle of the country, they now live everywhere else, but carry Ames with them. Their story is universal, even common, and on that level it can’t help but resonate with any woman who has ever had a friend. And yet some of their experiences together are so completely one-of-a-kind — haunting and touching and exhilarating – that I found myself feeling spellbound as they talked to me.
The Ames girls were intrigued by the idea of a book about them, but understandably, several were hesitant at first. It is not an easy decision to reveal your life to a journalist (and eventually to the world), and I tried to move slowly and respectfully with them. Turning their lives into an open book, I said, would be a journey for them and for me. I wanted to know vital details of their interactions, the good and the bad. I’d ask them about the times they showed each other great care and compassion. But I also wanted them to reflect on the times they disappointed each other, or were purposely unkind. How did they overcome those moments and remain so close for so long?
A few of them feared that my reporting for the book might bring up old ghosts, or highlight long-ago misdeeds, or challenge their assumptions about themselves. I asked them to take that risk with me. Yes, I hoped that the finished book would honor and strengthen their friendships. But I couldn’t guarantee that everything would go smoothly, and that no one would get hurt.
We began with tentative steps. One by one, often in long phone conversations after they tucked their kids into bed, they talked to me about their loving feelings for each other, the rougher times between them, and about how their story, if told well, could benefit other women of all ages. I decided to take a year-long leave from my job at the Journal, so I could travel around the country spending time with them. I immersed myself in their lives, asking them to think back, to think hard, to force themselves to remember everything as clearly and honestly as they could. Why did they choose each other? Who were they then and who are they now? They all turned out to be so articulate, so able to find perspective and broader truths. Because of that, compiling their story became a remarkable experience for me as a journalist.
As we got to know each other, the Ames girls became more comfortable with me. In time, they let me read hundreds of pages of secrets locked in their old diaries. They shared stacks of letters and emails they had exchanged. They introduced me to their parents, children, siblings, husbands and old boyfriends. They even pointed me toward women outside their group who saw them as a clique and didn’t much like them.
Born in 1962 and 1963, they spoke vividly about what it was like to be girls in the sixties and seventies, young women in the eighties, and new mothers in the nineties. They offered up countless examples of how close female friendships can shape every aspect of women’s lives.
Almost all of the Ames girls are scrupulous savers, chronicling their lives together in scrapbooks and photo albums, holding on to whatever memorabilia marked their friendship. That was a huge help in piecing together their story. Because I had their diaries, letters, concert-ticket stubs and notes passed in homeroom, I was able to track many of their interactions to the exact day and even the exact hour. I felt like an archeologist, sifting through crumbling prom corsages, looking for meaning.
Of course, there were plenty of challenges. When I’d tell people about this project, some wondered whether it was an appropriate task for a man. Could a man ever really understand women’s friendships? It was a fair point. And I admit that I sometimes asked the Ames girls questions that were silly, obvious or naïve. I’d catch them trading glances, and I knew that they were thinking: “This guy doesn’t get it, does he?” And yet, I also think that being a man gave me a wider canvas. I was often inquisitive in ways a female interviewer would not have been. I made no assumptions. I asked. I rephrased. I tried to comprehend. On some fronts, my outsider’s curiosity helped enrich the story you’re about to read.
In the end, the girls and I agreed that to make the project work, it had to be based on a great deal of trust between all of us. We worked to build that trust, interview by interview, recollection by recollection, sometimes with tears, sometimes with great laughter.
Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana, Sheila.
Theirs is the story of 11 little girls and the women they became. I feel privileged to have this opportunity to tell it.
About Jeffrey Zaslow:
Coauthor of the international bestseller The Last Lecture, award-winning journalist Jeffrey Zaslow writes the Wall Street Journal’s “Moving On” column, which has inspired several Oprah segments. He has also written for Time and USA Weekend.
Other great blogs also on this tour:
Wednesday, April 14th: Simply Stacie
Thursday, April 15th: Silver and Grace
Friday, April 16th: Chaotic Compendiums
Monday, April 19th: Rundpinne
Tuesday, April 20th: Luxury Reading
Wednesday, April 21st: Book Nook Club
Thursday, April 22nd: Suko’s Notebook
Monday, April 26th: Feminist Review
Tuesday, April 27th: Beth’s Book Reviews
Wednesday, April 28th: Bookworm with a View
Thursday, April 29th: She Reads and Reads
Friday, April 30th: Book Blab
Monday, May 3rd: Cafe of Dreams
Tuesday, May 4th: Janel’s Jumble
Wednesday, May 5th: Anniegirl1138
Thursday, May 6th: Peeking Between the Pages
Monday, May 10th: One Person’s Journey Through a World of Books
Tuesday, May 11th: Life in the Thumb
Wednesday, May 12th: lit*chick
4 comments:
Oh, this book sounds great!
This is the first time I've heard of this. It sounds pretty good!
Oh, April, what a wonderful review! I'm so thrilled that you enjoyed the book. Thank you for being on the tour and for all the time you put into reading and writing about The Girls from Ames. We greatly appreciate it!
I just came from other blogs reading the reviews of this book. Thanks for sharing yours, April!
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