The Girls from Ames is not a suspenseful book, but it tells a moving story about a lasting friendship among 11 women. Jeffrey Zaslow is a journalist (also co-author of The Last Lecture) who became interested in the importance of women’s friendships, partly because he is the father of three teenaged daughters.

He heard about the Ames girls when one of them sent him an email after a column about such friendships appeared in the Wall Street Journal. He received many responses to that article, but the Ames girls intrigued him most. Their relationships began in elementary school, in pre-school for several of them. By high school, they were a tight-knit group, and they have kept in often daily touch since then, though they live all over the country now.

He opens their story with pictures of each in childhood and in high school. The pictures are an excellent touch, giving the reader another way to keep track of “whois who” as the story continues. The women welcomed Zaslow into their lives, letting him join one of their reunions. When they get together, they “pick up where they left off,” as the saying goes. However, they stay in such close touch that it’s as though they never leave off.

Though none live in Ames now, they still claim their hometown, and are proud of being from Iowa. The Iowa corn figures in several of their stories, from the experience of detasseling corn as a summer job for some, to the keg parties held in corn fields where the adults could not detect what was going on.

They are in their forties now, and have shared their experiences from the boyfriends of their youth (they literally shared some of them) to marriages, divorce, and childbirth. Breast cancer, the death of children, and many other trials form part of this story. Each woman is introduced, and several are covered in detail, as they gather to look back in old scrapbooks, tell jokes, and reminisce about all that has occurred in their lives -- and still occurs.

Zaslow did research in other ways than interviewing these women. He points out that “researchers can now prove scientifically that women who share long-term friendships can find profound comfort recounting shared moments, good and bad.” (Sorry, but this required research?) One study indicated that women with the “most friends outlived those with the least friends by 22 percent.”

In contrasting the friendships of men with women’s, Zaslow states, “Women talk. Men do things together.” As other research has shown, the Ames girls’ husbands want to fix things, when the girls tell about a problem; a female friend is more likely to sympathize and relate her own encounter.

The reader gets to know Karla, Cathy, Sally, Karen, Jane, Angela, Marilyn, Sheila, Diana, Jenny, and Kelly, and comes to care about their joys and sorrows. Zaslow says, “Each year will bring new interactions, new reasons for reflection, new insights into who they are.” Their story is not over.

The Girls from Ames is available at the Mary Willis Library.