review written by local writer Alice Osborn
Click here to view the review on You Tube.

The idea for The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow (who co-wrote Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture) began when Zaslow wrote a column about the power of female friendships. According to experts, women who have strong female friendships as they age are more likely to live longer and healthier lives than those who do not.

This book tells the story of eleven girls from Ames, Iowa, the home of Iowa State, all born around 1963.  Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana and Sheila. There are now ten women, all in their mid-forties – Sheila died in her early twenties under mysterious circumstances. Some of the girls became friends in nursery school or later when they reached middle school. Angela Jamison, from Wake Forest, met the Ames girls when she entered 9th grade at Ames High. Jenny, the official chronicler of the group, initially wrote to Jeffrey Zaslow and he soon became interested in her story and the strength of this decades-long friendship. The book is filled with childhood and high school photographs so you can keep track of all eleven girls. An even better way to match the girl with her story is by clicking on the book’s website:  http://girlsfromames.com.

During the course of the book we learn that not all of girls got along at the same time and that most of the girls had a best friend within the group: Jane/Marilyn, Jenny/Sheila, Sally/Cathy and Karla/Diana. The Ames girls had a formidable clique during their high school years and their group was called “the S**t Sisters.” One girl who worked in a bakery pulled a prank on them by defacing their graduation cake with brown icing. Sometimes the girls weren’t always nice to each other. In one story, the girls held an intervention at a slumber party when they thought that Sally was too shy. Their goal was to tell Sally that she may be too different to belong to their group.

Even though the girls knew they could burp or pass gas in front of their friends, they weren’t as forthcoming talking about boys. Many of the girls dated the same boy and all of the girls had different ideas of sexual boundaries. Marilyn, is one of the four featured girls in the book and she was the doctor’s daughter and the square. In college she believes she was date-raped, but her friend Kelly, the most outspoken girl of the group, went out with the boy and saw him as a decent guy.

After the girls graduated from high school, they moved to eight different states. Despite the distance they stayed in touch, mostly through their strong two-person friendships and by getting together in person for both happy (Karla’s daughter’s birth) or sad occasions (Sheila’s funeral).

It seems to me that Zaslow is a better column writer than book-length writer. I felt he was missing a certain flow with the book as he couldn’t quite figure out how to integrate the girls’ stories with facts about female friendships. I know that several of the girls didn’t want to have their stories featured, so that’s why only four women have their own chapters: Marilyn, Karla, Sheila and Kelly. But it would have made for a better book if all eleven girls had a chapter just for them. Despite these shortcomings, the book’s frame of the reunion at Angela’s house in Wake Forest is a clever device that meshes who the girls were in childhood to who they are now. The girls interacted with each other, so we were able to hear their voices. Zaslow makes them all very real for the reader.

It is a testament to these women that these “girls” have been friends for so long. Some of the reasons why their friendship has endured is because of their informal rules: if they have negative things to say about one another, it stays within the group, they don’t brag about their husbands’ jobs or incomes and they make every effort to be there for the key events in each other’s lives: weddings, serious illnesses, and funerals. The message in this book is to honor your female friendships even if they are sometimes rocky because women who do experience better health and better relationships with their coworkers, partners and children.