Women Friendship

At 80 years old, Florence Carter is content with her life. A widow in her twilight years, she spends her days making intricate lino prints in the company of her dog and cat, and her neighbor’s daughter Alice, a shy young woman troubled by a recent trauma. But when ​Flo learns that a long-lost friend has written a novel based on their time at finishing school, she’s forced to confront a secret from her past....

Money and fame: in 1970s Los Angeles, everyone is fighting to reach the top, but very few have the talent, ambition, and luck to get there. Meet LA darling Evra Scott. The daughter of an Oscar-winning director and a Brazilian bombshell actress, Evra is the city’s reigning style queen. By day, she’s at the helm of Sunset on Sunset, the store beloved by Hollywood’s young and beautiful. By night, she’s on the arm of Kai de la Faire, Hawaii’s hottest export, and the screenwriter of the moment.

Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although she was told the rooms were empty, a dazed, sleepy woman appears before her. This is Mrs. Miller, aka Marilyn Monroe, whose stay in Reno coincides with the breakdown of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the filming of what was to be her last film, The Misfits.

Few people knew America's comic sweetheart Lucille Ball the way Lee Tannen did. Lee first met Lucy as a child but cemented their close and enduring friendship as an adult. During the last 10 years of Lucy's life - years mostly lived out of the spotlight and mainly around a backgammon table in New York; Beverly Hills; Snowmass, Colorado; and Palm Springs - Lee was fortunate enough to be sitting opposite Lucy.

As the turbulent twentieth-century nears its end, calls for independence grow increasingly louder in the Soviet Georgia. During this period of great upheaval, childhood friends Keto, Dina, Nene, and Ira grow up in one of the many “Italian courtyards” that define Tbilisi’s Sololaki neighborhood. Rising up to challenges both personal and political, the four women’s friendship seems indestructible, until an unforgivable act of betrayal and a tragic death shatters their bond.

In a suburb outside Cleveland, a community of Indian Americans has settled into lives that straddle the divide between Eastern and Western cultures. For some, America is a bewildering and alienating place where coworkers can't pronounce your name but will eagerly repeat the Sanskrit phrases from their yoga class. Harit, a lonely Indian immigrant in his mid-40s, lives with his mother, who can no longer function after the death of Harit's sister, Swati.

Can guys and girls ever be just friends? According to Audrey Tate and Clarke West, absolutely. After all, they’ve been best friends since childhood without a single romantic entanglement. Clarke is the charming playboy Audrey can always count on, and he knows that the ever-loyal Audrey will never not play along with his strategy for dodging his matchmaking mother — announcing he’s already engaged…to Audrey.

Widowed Samantha Arias hasn’t spoken to Holly Dunfee in forever. It’s for the best. Samantha prefers to avoid conflict. The blisteringly honest Holly craves it. What they still have in common puts them both back on speed dial: a mutual love for Katie, their best friend of twenty-five years, now hospitalized with cancer and needing one little errand from her old college roomies. It’s simple: travel cross-country together, steal her loathsome ex-husband’s VW camper, find Katie’s diabetic Great Pyrenees at a Utah pound, and drive him back home to Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, the Peacock sisters were little girls who combed each other’s tangled hair. But decades of secrets have led them to separate lives—and to telling lies, to themselves and to one another. Sylvie is getting married. Again. A librarian and widow who soothes her grief by escaping into books (and shelving them perfectly), Sylvie has caught the attention of an unlikely match: Simon Rampling, a mysterious, wealthy man from Northern England. Sylvie allows herself to imagine a life beside him—one filled with the written word, kindness, and companionship.

Rhett Gallagher’s adventurous life is imploding. Just as she turns the big 4-0, her long-term relationship collapses and her gran’s death draws her back to the family farm. The only silver lining is that Rhett’s inspirational book, The Modern Pioneer Girl’s Guide to Life—written under a pseudonym—has become a wild success, so much so that when her big publicity moment comes, self-doubting Rhett panics and persuades her best friend, Jasmine, to step into the limelight in her stead.

Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven't spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget

Anna Sarnoff is still reeling from her quickie divorce from tech wunderkind Jake Sarnoff. Forced out of the company that she helped Jake build, Anna is trying to pick up the pieces of her life, navigating the waters of solo parenting their two teenage boys and adapting to her new role of ex-wife. To make things more complicated, Jake seems to want her back…and his persuasiveness tempts her to say yes.

Operation Starfish has one goal: to remove domestic violence survivors from danger. But when a mission backfires in tragedy, the band of bikers who founded OpStar dissolves the organization and their ride-or-die friendship. Five years later Amanda, Sidney, and Cassandra are brought back together by the same thing that tore them apart when the man who victimized his wife is murdered, and all signs point to Cassandra.

Blaine Grayson returns to Three Sisters Island with a grand plan - to take Camp Kicking Moose to the next level. Her dream starts to unravel when she discovers Moose Manor's kitchen has been badly remodeled by her sister, Cam, who doesn't know how to cook. Added to that blow is the cold shoulder given by her best friend, Artie Lotosky, now a doctor to the unbridged Maine islands. As old wounds are opened, Blaine starts to wonder if she made a mistake by coming home.

Antique-store owner Cricket Crosby’s life is turned upside down when she discovers that the rumors of her husband’s affair aren’t just leisurely Southern gossip. Her plan: hire an investigator; find an attorney; enlist the help of her new assistant, Ruby; and make her husband pay.

Anna Cavanaugh is a restless young widow and brilliant French teacher at an all-girls school in Washington, DC. Everything changes when she’s recruited into the Office of Strategic Services by family friend and legendary WWI hero Major General William Donovan. Donovan has faith in her - and in all his “glorious amateurs” who are becoming Anna’s fast friends: Maggie, Anna’s down-to-earth mentor; Irene, who’s struggling to find support from her husband for her clandestine life; and Julia, a cheerful OSS liaison.

Moira Wellman has always loved makeovers - helping women find their most beautiful selves. Funny how it’s taken her five years with her abusive boyfriend, Lang, to realize she needs a life makeover. When Moira finally gets the courage to leave Lang, the beachside town of Moonlight Harbor is the perfect place to start over. Soon, Moira is right at home, working at Waves Salon, making new friends, and helping her clients find new confidence. When she meets a handsome police officer, she’s more than willing to give him a free haircut. Maybe even her heart.

Here comes the bride... but how long can she hide? When Kitty Clayton flees her wedding, her life seems worryingly futureless. All she knows is she'd rather sleep on the streets than go back to cheating Ethan. After picking her up hitch-hiking, widowed children's author Jack Duffy takes Kitty under his wing until she gets back on her feet. And it's not long before the two grow close.

CNN news anchor Brooke Baldwin explores the phenomenon of “huddling", when women lean on one another to provide each other support, empowerment, inspiration, and the strength to solve problems or enact meaningful change. Beyond the headline-making huddles of recent years such as the #MeToo movement, the Time's Up initiative, and the 2018 midterm elections, when women won a historic number of seats across the country, Baldwin tells the stories of women of all ages, races, religions and socio-economic backgrounds who are huddling in all segments of society.

With The Interruption of Everything, her sixth novel, Terry McMillan takes on the fault lines of mid-life and family life, reminds us once again of the redeeming power of friendship, and turns her eye toward the dilemma of how a woman starts to put her own needs higher on the to-do list while not shortchanging everyone else.