Ames girls teach a lesson in friendship
As a lifestyles columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow chronicles the business of living itself in “Moving On,” a column about transitions.
His subjects have ranged from the emotional last lecture of a 47-year-old Carnegie Mellon University professor dying of pancreatic cancer to “Mr. Grandmoms” — men who are raising their grandchildren.
But few stories have been as rewarding, Zaslow says, as the one behind “The Girls From Ames”, his book about 11 women from Ames, Iowa, who have maintained a 40-year friendship through marriage, children, divorce, disease, death and relocation.
Zaslow, 51, whose book about professor Randy Pausch, “The Last Lecture,” hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list last year, says writing about female friendship was a different game. “Women’s friendships are more intense than men’s,” he says. “I envy their friendship.”
There’s Marilyn, the earnest doctor’s daughter who grew up to be a stay-at-home mom in Minnesota. There’s Cathy, who never married and became a makeup artist in Los Angeles. There’s Jenny, the last to have a child and now an assistant dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Zaslow learned about the group when one of them e-mailed him in response to a 2006 column about friendship. He joined the women, now in their 40s on a reunion in North Carolina. Over two years, he pored over diaries, old photos and letters, in the process becoming an honorary member of the group.
There are memories of first kisses, school dances, late-night keggers in cornfields, love affairs, fights, secret code words still used today and the at once exhilarating and daunting experience of growing up.
The experience, he said, underscored research findings: “On every front, from your mental health to physical health to life span, close friendship is key.”
Happiness, Zaslow says, could be as simple as a lasting friendship, something women —and men—increasingly need in their fast-paced lives.
Those who are younger than the Ames circle may be more apt to keep in touch via e-mail and Facebook than letters and land lines, but “I wouldn’t say friendship is dead,” he says. “It’s just changed.”
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