Book Review: The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow

by Eliza Fayle

ISBN: 978-1592405329
Page Count: 352
Release Date: April 6, 2010

The Girls from Ames, by Jeffrey Zaslow. The sub-title is A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship. A perfect book for Silver & Grace. Right gender, right age group, right values. A book I was happy to review.

Then I found out it was eleven women. That’s right eleven women! Oh dear, I thought. I am not going to be able to relate to this. As I point out in my post The importance of female friendships, I am really not a sista type of gal.

But I endevour to be open-minded in my book reviews and dove in to see what I could find.

Getting to know the girls

First, I found photographs. I love photographs. Ask anyone who friends me on Facebook. The first thing I do is go and stalk every single one of their photo albums.

Photographs of the girls when they were little. Photographs of them in highschool. As young women. And now.

Okay, we are off to a good start. I already feel like I know these women, because I have a visual.

Hey, this is my life!

Next, they are all my age. As in born the same year as me, give or take one side of that year or the other. I got every single one of the pop culture references. It was like walking through my own life. Music, hair, clothes, food, movies. It was all there.

Now I have a visual AND I’m feeling at home.

Finally, I realized it didn’t matter that it was a story about eleven female friends, it was equally relevant to just two or three in a friendship. The support, the laughs, the tears, and even the cruelties described are universal amongst friends.

Huge kudos

Kudos to these women who laid their lives bare. Not so much to the world, but to each other. They took a huge risk allowing the author, Zaslow, to write about what they were really thinking in various situations. I can just imagine some of the tears that had to have happened. “Why didn’t you tell me that is what you really thought?”

And yet, the proof of their friendship is it survived this minute dissection.

And kudos to Zaslow. He entered a world that most men simply just accept as fact while being careful to stay on the periphery.

Enter it and interrupt it. And quite well, actually.

Warning!

I do have two warnings.

At first, I found the flow of the story a bit disjointed. But then I had a good chuckle to myself recognizing that Zaslow wrote the book exactly the way women communicate. We finish each other’s sentences. We jump to new streams of thoughts with no warning. We return to old streams of thoughts with no warning. And yet, somehow, we know exactly what each other is talking about at all times.

It was probably the only way that made sense to write it. I can just image the poor man’s notes!

Second, this book comes with a serious tears warning. Just so you know, there is an entire chapter dedicated to the illness of a child. However, I do have to say this was my favourite chapter. Here is where the true intricacies of female friendship shone through loud and clear.

If you were born around 1963, you will totally get every word in this book. For the rest of you, it is an incredible telling of the psychology of female friendships.

Eliza Fayle is author of Silver & Grace, a blog dedicated to all aspects of aging gracefully, be it physical or spiritual. One of her greatest joys in blogging is promoting a community of sharing and friendship amongst women around the world.