Between Friends: Writing Women Celebrate Friendship - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395657849 ISBN 13: 9780395657843

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

This collection of essays on friendship includes works by such distinguished wirters as Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, and Wendy Wasserstein. Simultaneous. 17,500 first printing. Serial rights, Mirabella, Story, & The Ladies' Home Journal.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Pearlman, editor of Listen to Their Voices (1993) and A Voice of One's Own (not reviewed), has a talent for rustling up the most interesting guests for her literary salons. This new collection of essays, centering on the nature of friendship, and its importance in these women writers' lives, is no exception. What are friends for? How does one find them? How is it possible to hang onto them through all of life's vicissitudes? Pearlman's essayists approach these questions from refreshingly varying points of view--in some cases revealing shameful secrets of their own pasts, and in others offering rousing tributes to companions who have helped make life's journey fun. Margot Livesey's luminous evocation of her isolated Scottish childhood ends with the discovery of friends in less class-conscious America who have helped her rediscover her past. Michelle Cliff celebrates her glamorous Jamaican grandmother, half Jean Rhys and half Auntie Mame, who applauded Cliff's efforts to write about long-suppressed family secrets. Jane Smiley tackles the ticklish subject of using friends as literary fodder. Wendy Wasserstein worries over competition between women friends. Carolyn See offers a vivid picture of two girls growing up poor in East Hollywood and remaining best friends as they make their marks on the world. And in a particularly unsettling piece, Angela Davis-Gardner describes a pubescent obsession with the most popular girl in her North Carolina school, a ``non-friend'' who inhabited the bookish Davis- Gardner's dreams for decades--until the writer's progress in her work set her free. A passionate and profoundly life-affirming collection. (Serial rights to Ladies Home Journal, Glamour, Utne Reader, etc.) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The editor of A Voice of One's Own and Listen to Their Voices here assembles a winning collection of 20 original essays on friendship by a varied group ranging from such relative newcomers as Connie Porter and Christine O'Hagan to well known names like Joyce Carol Oates, Carolyn See, Jayne Anne Phillips and Shirley Abbott. Some authors discuss specific people they have known. Jill McCorkle, for example, explores the joys of her shared history with girlhood chum Cathy Lewis, even though it includes embarrassments: when their apartment was robbed, Cathy's wardrobe was stolen, but hers wasn't--confirming Cathy's opinion of Jill's taste in clothes. Others contemplate the pain of not having friends. Angela Davis-Gardner recalls what it was like to be excluded from the "inner circle" of junior high Southern belles, an experience that resonated through her adulthood. Considering friendship in the abstract, Jane Smiley wonders if it is possible for writers to have friends at all, while Wendy Wasserstein argues that female friendships have "the same bumps and turns" and must be as carefully cultivated as other relationships. Reading these essays may not quite match spending an evening with an old friend, but it makes a pretty good second. First serial to Mirabella, Story, Glamour and Ladies ' Home Journal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0395657849
• ISBN 13: 9780395657843
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251
• Editor: Mickey Pearlman