Heart to Heart: Deepening Women's Friendships at Midlife

Women's female friends are as important to them at midlife as they were in adolescence, declares Patricia Gottlieb Shapiro (My Turn: Women's Search for Self After the Children Leave). Except now, she continues, those friendships are not based on need so much as on sustenance grounded in maturity and confidence. Citing experts, her own friends and other women whom she interviewed, Shapiro presents Heart to Heart: Deepening Women's Friendships at Midlife, an intimate and incisive look at the rewards and challenges (envy, broken confidences, illness, death) that meaningful friendships offer and how to steer those friendships skillfully through waters both rough and calm. Agent, Carol Mann. (May 8)