In the Name of Friendship: A Novel (Classic Feminist Writers)
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 1558615210 / Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY, May 2006
Updates Marilyn French's classic The Women's Room to explore the realities of contemporary women.
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<div>Marilyn French’s seven million copy bestseller <i>The Women’s Room</i> crystallized the issues that ignited the women’s movement. Now the acclaimed author updates that classic with a new exploration of the truths and realities behind women’s lives. <i>In the Name of Friendship</i> dares to investigate how the women’s movement changed the lives of those it touched and what hurdles it left to cross.<br><br>Set in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, this wise novel is a group portrait of four disparate women who forge life-altering friendships despite personalities that vary as greatly as their vocations and ages. The novel weaves together a series of family crises with the friendships that help the four women refashion their lives. Maddy, the seventy-six-year-old real estate agent and matriarch of the group, struggles with the gradual death of her angry and rebellious Vietnam-marked son; fifty-year-old Alicia fights to reconnect her gay son with her newly retired husband; seventy-year-old musician Emily strives to bridge the gap with her estranged niece right at the moment her composition career starts to finally bloom; and Jenny, the thirty-year-old painter and baby of the group, questions the life she has created with her successful painter husband and tries to decide if she wants more from life.<br><br>With this unusual group of multi-generational ladies, French tells a truly rare tale about four women who accidentally come into each other’s lives and in the process form an enduring friendship. It is a story of supporting one another, of looking at the grim conflicts created by cultural expectations of women, and realizing you are not alone—truly a tale of continuing hope.</div>
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