- Random House
Most of what I know about close, lifelong female friendships—the all-consuming kind, that start in the sandbox, continue through confidences about first periods and first gropings with boys, and survive marriage and children (though of course the friends are maids of honor and aunties to each other’s children)—comes from books. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, Betsy and Tacy, other characters from way more mediocre novels whose names I can’t remember now, but who also share a deep and abiding, though strictly platonic, love. Reading about these friendships made me feel lonely, especially when I was younger, like I was missing something essential in life, even more essential than marriage. Men come and go, sometimes die. But friendship is forever!
Thorpe hits on an essential truth about all those books about beautiful lifelong female friendships: they’re really only the story of one girl. We never learn what the best friend—Diana or Tacy—is thinking, or even how they feel about being an accessory or left behind because they’re so much less interesting. Thorpe never really lets us in on the full truth about Lorrie Ann, either, but that’s the tantalizing part: just that there’s something there, and it’s not necessarily good.
