The Girls from Ames: Review and Giveaway

"My friends are my estate."
~Emily Dickinson

Early in life, I discovered the joys of friendship. I had a best friend starting in second or third grade, a girl named Patricia who lived in my neighborhood. Our first meeting was outside of a pet store, where we'd both stopped to admire some puppies playing in the window, while walking home from school one afternoon. We became inseparable friends after that, spending time together at school and outside of school. More often than not over the years, I've had a best friend, a deep friendship that lasted a year or two (or until I made a new best friend). While I don't belong to a large group of very close friends at this particular point in my life, I do have many female friends, and have been able to reconnect with a majority of my former best friends on Facebook this past year.

Friendship has been very important to me since childhood. However, I honestly didn't know if I'd enjoy reading about other people's friends. Would I find reading The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship tiresome? I grew up in NYC--could I relate to a story about growing up in Ames, a small, college-town in Iowa, filled with cornfields? Were the girls boring goody two-shoes? I wasn't sure if this book would truly hold my interest.

Published in 2009, The Girls from Ames was written by Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who also coauthored the inspirational book The Last Lecturewith Randy Pausch, which I read and reviewed. The book began because one of the Ames girls, Jenny, sent Jeffrey an email in 2003 about her group of friends. Three years later, he started an enormous project: to write a book about eleven girls with a forty-year friendship.

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
~Anais Nin

The author introduces each girl--Karla, Kelly, Marilyn, Jane, Jenny, Karen, Cathy, Angela, Sally, Diana, and Sheila--and provides a bit of family background. Most of the girls met each other in kindergarten or first-grade, and have stayed in touch in spite of moving from Ames to eight other states (all but one left Iowa), and starting their own families and careers.

"Friendship doubles our joy and divides our grief."
~Swedish proverb

Throughout four decades, the Ames girls have remained very supportive of each other. Although they no longer live close to each other, they stay in touch through email and other means, get together for special events in their lives, such as weddings, have reunions, and celebrate the joys in the group, such as children born to members of the group. They also experience their share of sorrows, of death and illness, including cancer. (Why are so many relatively young women getting cancer--or is it just early detection? I have many friends and acquaintances who are cancer survivors.)

The Ames girls are not goody two-shoes, and were as adventurous as I was while growing up. Many of the girls are quite frank and talk about the past and present in candid terms--about boys, cornfield "keggers", men, marriage, divorce, jobs, depression, children--and openly reveal their feelings. I'm of the "same vintage", more or less, as the Ames Girls, so I could relate to a lot in this book. I cried near the end of Chapter 7, The Intervention, and at other parts of the book as well. I really felt the connection between these women, and as I became immersed in their stories, I thought about my own friendships over the years. Like the girls from Ames, I recognize the importance of celebrating special moments; this year I've been attending birthdays lunches for a group of about ten women (some of whom I don't know that well yet, but friendship takes time to develop and ripen). For me, friendship is an absolutely essential part of a healthy life, and I read the book with an eye toward how I could improve the quality of my own friendships, and help my children flourish in this area of life.

As a journalist, the author realizes the value of presenting honest stories about real people, and I was totally absorbed by this book. The events in The Girls from Ames are even more touching because they are true, and the book is wonderfully written, and quite humorous at times. If friendship is a subject near and dear to your heart, then this book is for you.

Terrific news! Penguin Group is generously offering a copy of The Girls from Ames as a giveaway (U.S./Canada only).

• To enter this giveaway, simply leave a comment.
• For an extra entry, leave a comment about the role of friendship in your own life, or a favorite quote about friendship.
  
• For another chance at winning, become a follower of this blog, or let me know that you're already a follower.
• For an additional chance, post about this contest on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter.

Enter by 5 PM PDT on Thursday, May 6. The winner will be selected randomly and announced on Friday, May 7. You can also enter a different giveaway to win multiple copies of this book for your book club, so keep reading!

Special thanks to Lisa from TLC and Penguin Group for sending me The Girls from Ames. While reading this book, I thought it would be a great choice for book clubs. (I am not a member of a book club, although this book makes me wish I were.) If you take a few moments to register your book club with TLC by April 30, you could win up to 10 copies of this book in TLC's Book Club of the Month contest, a new feature at TLC! For more reviews of this book, visit the other stops on TLC's book tour for The Girls from Ames. To "meet" the Ames girls, please visit the official website for The Girls from Ames.

This book counts toward the Women Unbound Reading Challenge hosted by Aarti, Care, and Eva.

The Last Lecture

"I lectured about the joy of life, about how much I appreciated life, even with so little of my own left. I talked abut honesty, integrity, gratitude, and other things I hold dear. And I tried very hard not to be boring."
~ Introduction to The Last Lecture,
Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008)

Unlike many lectures, this book is anything but boring. With but a few months left to live, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the university on Sept. 18, 2007 before a full auditorium. In his lecture entitled, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about the lessons he learned, and gave advice on how to achieve goals and dreams, and the importance of helping others to reach theirs. He decided to also put his stories into a book of fifty-three "lectures", for the family he'd soon leave behind, and the world at large.

I've just finished reading The Last Lecture, coauthored by Jeffrey Zaslow, a very touching book about the lecture by Randy Pausch, professor of computer science, human computer interaction and design; he co-founded Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, and was the creator of the Alice interactive computing program, used by students worldwide. Randy Pausch lost his life to pancreatic cancer at the age of 47, leaving behind his wife, Jai, and three young children. In his lecture, he talks a lot about the importance of his childhood dreams. I do not wish to spoil the book by telling you about each and every dream, but I will mention something notable from his childhood. As a teenager, he wanted to paint on the walls in his room, and his parents allowed him to express his creativity in this way. I mentioned this to my 11-year-old daughter, and asked her if she wanted to paint anything on her walls. Did she ever! The rainbow shown below was her first wall painting, and she's also added a couple of animals and is currently working on a tree. She loves painting on her walls! I think her room looks more unique with these paintings.

The filmed lecture and book are a way
for Randy's children, Chloe, Logan, and Dylan, who are now without their father, to "grow up" with him. For the rest of us, it's an inspiring book about living your best life.

You can listen to Randy Pausch's last lecture here. More than 37,000 Americans each year are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My good friend Gayle-Robin lost her brother, Alan, to pancreatic cancer. This post is dedicated to Alan, who was a wonderful brother, uncle, and friend. For more information about pancreatic cancer, please visit The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.