The Girls from Ames: guest post from Jenny
The Girls from Ames has been a fixture on best-seller lists, thanks to its theme of enduring friendship. We asked Jenny Litchman of Annapolis, one of the "girls," to tell us how the book has changed her life. To hear more, drop by the Barnes & Noble in Annapolis (2516 Solomon's Island Road), where she, author Jeff Zaslow and two other "girls" will hold a reading at 7:30 Thursday, July 16. Here's Jenny:
I am “Jenny from Ames,” the one who started this whole thing. When I wrote Jeff Zaslow an e-mail six years ago, commenting on a column he had just written, I had no idea that my best friends and I would become “characters” in a best-selling non-fiction book about women’s friendships. When my friends and I entered into this project with Jeff, we truly had no idea that anyone would want to read a book about 11 small-town girls from the Midwest. We really agreed to do it because we wanted a chronicle of our friendship for ourselves and our daughters.
I couldn’t imagine, before, that people would find us very interesting, since what has happened to us, individually and collectively, over the years happens to millions of people around the world every day. But I guess that’s exactly why people like it so much, because our stories are universal, and readers see themselves and their own friends in our pages.
I have been fortunate these last few months, since the book came out, to have been the recipient of lots of stories about other people’s friends. I can’t tell you how many times someone at work, for instance, has come into my office, closed my door, and told me how much they enjoyed reading our book and how much my friends remind me of their friends. They then will tell me about their current best friend(s), their oldest childhood friend(s), the best friend that they lost touch with, or their closest, dearest friend who died and left them so lonely for a best friend.
It has been my privilege to be the recipient of these stories and I’m so happy that this book has been the mechanism by which we women start a dialog about our friends and the role they play in our lives. Most people tell me that reading our book has made them either pull their own friends closer to them or it has inspired them to reconnect with friends with whom they had lost touch.
The role that friendship plays in our health is also touched on in the book. Jeff cites several research studies that show how our health is impacted in a positive way when we have close, caring friendships. Two of the girls from Ames were diagnosed with breast cancer and they feel certain that our close friendship helped them get through their diagnoses and treatments, both from a physical and mental standpoint. It is my hope that one day every doctor’s regular advice will be not to “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning” but rather to “Call two friends and take an aspirin in the morning.”
This experience has affected me in a very profound way. I will never again take for granted my relationships with each of my nine sisters. I suspect it is common that most of us take our good friends for granted, especially in the course of our busy lives when we don’t have time to stop and really think about how special these relationships are. I had always assumed that everyone had this many close, best friends. It wasn’t until Jeff started writing the book and doing the research that I realized that many people have just one good friend, or maybe two or three. But to have nine best friends really is special, and I know that now. I so appreciate each and every one of them for the incredibly warm, intelligent, caring, thoughtful and hysterically funny women they are.
I know, without a doubt, that we will be friends when Jeff Zaslow is writing the sequel “The Old Ladies from the Ames Nursing Home.” I know that, no matter what, they will be there for me, and I for them. Always.
