friendship

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow tells the remarkable story of the 40-year friendship of a circle of eleven female friends. The tale chronicles more than the experience of coming of age in the midwest—it offers universal insights on growing up, living a life, and facing the sobering challenges faced by grown-ups, which often include: marriage, divorce, raising a family, balancing life and work, and coping with serious illness and death among family members and close friends. The narrative pays homage to the significant role that friendship can play in the course of women's lives.



The “girls,” who all met as children in the “corn-and-college” town of Ames, Iowa, are introduced in photographs with short bios at the beginning of the book. As the reader turns the pages, however, each woman develops a textured persona as Zaslow brilliantly weaves together their individual and collective stories through interviews, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, news clips and diaries. Their long friendship as a group has enabled the girls from Ames to piece together and preserve the anecdotes that comprise their lives individually.



This compelling and beautifully written non-fiction book is destined to become a classic in the female friendship literature. Zaslow’s last book, coauthored with Randy Pausch, was the best-selling book The Last Lecture