The Girls from Ames

I'm a curious person. Pretty much everything makes me think. And every once in a while a piece of writing really stands out because of how it's written, what the topic is, just because it came along at the right time.

This is the long awaited, or rather, long talked about, by me, review of the book that has, essentially, consumed me for a couple of years.

A few years ago the family took Erin to the airport to send her off to Germany for the summer. While there I saw a book in the Borders store called "The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship" by Jeffrey Zaslow. I read the back and was intrigued at the idea of a book about a large group of women, who have been friends for their entire lives, and that one had died under suspicious circumstances early in their twenties.

I didn't buy it then and forgot the name.

A few weeks later I saw a review of the book in the Arizona Republic. It was hanging up at a Starbucks in Scottsdale. One of the waitresses who works there is one of the Ames girls.

I knew I had to read this book, but again, forgot what it was called and I spent the next year, at least, trying to remember what it was called.

And one day I was in Barnes and Noble and I just sat down in a free arm chair in the middle of the store, look up, and there it is. The blue book with the black and white picture of the girls on a display.

It was meant to be.

And this book is incredible!



After a call for stories of female friendships for his column in The Wall Street Journal, Zaslow received an email from one of the girls and spends a weekend with them during one of their reunions; he spent time interviewing each of them individually, they've all brought photos, old letters, diaries, all forms of memorabilia with them to show him the chronicles of their forty-year friendship.

I don't know how to do a proper review but stick with me; I usually work it out in the end. But the first word that came to my mind when thinking of how to describe this book was "coming of age." It's a story of these women's shared life and how it impacts their individual selves. We see into their childhoods, the ways they grew up, how their parents treated them and how that impacts their own parenting styles, their relationships with boys who also eventually grow up, their experimenting with substances and rule breaking in general, their twenties and time in college, how they went their separate ways and kept each other in their lives, their lives as adults now that they're married with children, are single, are career driven, are home bodies, are facing cancer.

I started reading on the plane back to El Paso after my trip to Miami. I was barely through the second chapter when I started hysterically crying. On a plane. Next to a stranger. I couldn't help it.

And it wasn't the last time I had a visceral reaction. The book really moved me. I laughed and cried, I was scared and concerned, I was involved. Captivated, really.

I liked how Zaslow included research to back up what he was finding within this friendship because anecdotes do not make theory or even truth. Not that can be generalized. The girls from Ames are special.

I read a really negative review about it; this guy didn't find any of the information provided to be anything new or unique. The fact that female friendships are different than male friendships is common knowledge, but how, why...those things are not readily known and the book explores that a little. The fact that friendships are good for your health, didn't phase him. It's actually more dangerous to your health to be lonely than to be obese.

The most offensive part of his review though was his view that the only take home message from the book is that we can be glad these girls aren't your friends due to the state of their lives. The only two notable individuals, in his opinion, are the Hollywood makeup artist and the girl who worked for a Congressman who was found to have paid for sex from a sixteen-year old girl. The other women whose lives include marriage and divorce, death, children, cancer, varied jobs including teaching, writing, medicine, makeup, politics, psychology, accounting and barista-ing, who've stayed friends for FORTY-YEARS through letter writing, emails, reunions, weddings, funerals...all of these are of no consequence for him.

Him, the guy who missed the point.

Not only the point of the book, but the point of this thing called life. Because in my opinion, finding what people do with their time and in their lives trivial and unimportant has no clue. No one is meaningless.

"Someday, when we're old women, we'll be able to sit together and look back at these richly detailed lives, [...] Even the most common of us have had these journeys. In one way or another, we have every woman's story" (p. 298).

And these women have something I want, something a lot of people want. They have friends for life. They have each other.

My dear friend Morgan, who is getting married this Saturday, sent out an email to the ladies in her bridal party and I haven't asked her if I can share this but I'm sure she'll be ok with it/she'll never read this so she won't know it's reprinted here, but she, amidst her excitation just to be so close to her wedding day, expressed her joy in her friends and suggested this:

Lets all have babies together, and raise them together, and have bbq's together, and get old together! Sounds good!

Their closeness inspired me to think of my own friendships and the kind of person I am, the kind of woman I am and will be. The kind of friend I am. The above pictures are me with friends. The first are some of my friends from high school at our Christmas gathering this year, the second are girls from church when our bible study went to Prescott a few years ago.

There are 4 chapters dedicated to one specific girl, but as you read through it becomes clear that none of their stories are individual. These girls are so intertwined that there is no way to talk about one summer, or one boy, or one party without discussing some of the other girls. All their memories, everything that's happened to them and will happen has been together as a group.

It's incredibly rare and I loved the insight into them. I immediately liked all of them. But I think I identify with Kelly. The book isn't really written in a way that will make you take sides or like someone more than someone else, but I think Kelly and I are a lot alike. I wondered from the beginning, who the woman sitting alone in the picture was. The other girls are sitting on each other, arms around each other, in hugs, back to back, and on the bottom step she's there alone. In the group, but apart.

And she's very much apart of the group, but she's different. And they love her. Not all the women are married, a few are divorced, one has never married, most have children, some are stay at home moms, some are career women; this isn't a homogeneous group of women. I know a group of people who are all exactly the same. There is no variability in the ways they live their lives. A few people set the standard and the rest follow it. Kelly's ballsy. She's divorced, her kids live with their father, she writes and teaches journalism and speaks out against censorship, she's dating a man who used to be a student at her school. I like her.

I really loved this book. I still love it! I'll read it again. I'll assign it to be read when I teach Women's Studies classes. It led to my epiphany.

I'm grateful for it. For Jeffrey Zaslow for being brave enough to tackle the intricacies of female friendships and to gain the trust of all these women, deeply enough for them to share their lives, the very essence of themselves with him. And I love how he writes. Clear, direct, he paints the picture. I'm grateful for the girls from Ames. That they are out there. That this kind of relationship is possible. That they care about each other and notice the lives of the others.

"Having these women in my world has meant not only acceptance, but radiant joy and laughter that knocks me right out of my chair. Through our darkest moments, we have lifted each other up. In every moment of grief we've shared, our laughter is a life vest, a secure promise that we will not go under" (p. 261).