I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives [Paperback]

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 MEANWILL STRIKE A CHORD
WITH WOMEN OF ALL AGES.Patricia O'Brienis the author of the critically acclaimed novelThe Glory Cloakand co-author ofI Know Just What You Mean, aNew York Timesbestseller. She lives in Washington, D.C.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 forThe 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 -- whalÓy