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Zusatztext Caryl Rivers Boston Sunday Globe When historians ask what it was like for women and their friends in a time when it often seemed that everything was changing, this will be a book that provides the texture of life, as real people lived it. Informationen zum Autor Ellen Goodman and Patricia O'Brien Klappentext Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman and novelist-journalist Patricia O'Brien provide a thoughtful, deeply personal look at the enduring bonds of friendship between women. Friends for twenty-seven years, they have served as confessors and advisers to each other during romantic, career, and child-raising crises, and have shopped together, laughed together, and enjoyed a bond unlike any other.Drawing on interviews with numerous women, the authors take readers into the heart of "the place where women do the work of their lives, the growing, the understanding, the reflection," and illuminate both the fragility and strength of relationships that are irreplaceable lifelines.I KNOW JUST WHAT YOU MEAN WILL STRIKE A CHORD WITH WOMEN OF ALL AGES. Leseprobe Chapter One: Beginnings Ellen The sun was setting when I pulled my battered red Chevy Vega station wagon out of the driveway of the brown shingle house that I had just bought with every last nickel to my name, and headed off for Cambridge. The hands on the steering wheel were still speckled with the red paint that I had been rolling onto the living room walls that day, paint financed by the sale of an engagement ring from a former marriage and life. I was thirty-two years old, a single mother, with a five-year-old daughter and a brand new puppy, living less than a mile from the house in which I had grown up, and I was going back to Harvard ten years after graduation. An adult now, a journalist, a reporter for The Boston Globe, I had hustled and won a prize -- a mid-career Nieman Fellowship in journalism -- and I was off to meet the other members of my "class" for the first time. In those days, I was breathless. Coping with work and family and love -- what Zorba the Greek would call the whole catastrophe. I was not at all sure how the pieces of my life fit together. At work, I had learned to say what I thought and to write about ideas. I was by no means as confident when it came to the messy business of feelings. But this September of 1973, I knew, in some inchoate way, that I was on the edge of something more than a year "off." Perhaps a year "on." Pat While Ellen was driving from Brookline, I was on the bus coming from my rented house in Belmont, marveling at the fact that I had landed in this place, at this time, in this way. Harvard was only a few miles south of the working-class town of Somerville (known locally, I learned later, as "Slumerville"), where I had been born -- geographically close, but in the days when my Irish immigrant mother and father lived there, Harvard might as well have been on the moon. That was the past, this was now. I was thirty-seven, a newly divorced mother of four children working as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times with a year ahead of me as a Nieman Fellow. For a woman who had not graduated from college until she was thirty, this new venture felt like a huge leap across a class divide. Getting here had taken a certain amount of audacity, and even though I had an officially punched ticket of admission, I half expected someone to snatch it away at the last moment. I also had two teenage daughters living for the year with their father back home in Evanston, Illinois, and two younger girls nervously tiptoeing through a strange house, wondering what the year ahead would hold for them. This was by no means a carefree venture. But as I walked down those narrow streets toward the home of Jim Thomson, the head of the Nieman program -- the brick sidewalks scraping the back...
