In the Name of Friendship: A Novel

Marilyn French

ກ.ພ. 2008 · The Feminist Press at CUNY

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Marilyn French’s seven million copy bestseller The Women’s Room crystallized the issues that ignited the women’s movement. Now the acclaimed author updates that classic with a new exploration of the truths and realities behind women’s lives. In the Name of Friendship dares to investigate how the women’s movement changed the lives of those it touched and what hurdles it left to cross.

Set in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, this wise novel is a group portrait of four disparate women who forge life-altering friendships despite personalities that vary as greatly as their vocations and ages. The novel weaves together a series of family crises with the friendships that help the four women refashion their lives. Maddy, the seventy-six-year-old real estate agent and matriarch of the group, struggles with the gradual death of her angry and rebellious Vietnam-marked son; fifty-year-old Alicia fights to reconnect her gay son with her newly retired husband; seventy-year-old musician Emily strives to bridge the gap with her estranged niece right at the moment her composition career starts to finally bloom; and Jenny, the thirty-year-old painter and baby of the group, questions the life she has created with her successful painter husband and tries to decide if she wants more from life.

With this unusual group of multi-generational ladies, French tells a truly rare tale about four women who accidentally come into each other’s lives and in the process form an enduring friendship. It is a story of supporting one another, of looking at the grim conflicts created by cultural expectations of women, and realizing you are not alone—truly a tale of continuing hope.

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Marilyn French (1929-2009) was an American writer and notable feminist scholar. She received her BA from Hofstra College (now Hofstra University) in 1951; in 1964, she returned to Hofstra to earn her M.A. and later earned her PhD from Harvard University. French is best known for her first novel, the 21-million-copy bestseller The Women's Room, which is considered one of the most influential works of the modern feminist movement, and its sequel, In the Name of Friendship. She spent fifteen years researching and writing her immensely readable four volume women's history series From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World. Her other non-fiction works include Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals; The War Against Women; and her memoir on her battle with esophageal cancer, A Season in Hell. In addition to writing, French taught at Hofstra, Harvard, and Holy Cross College.