The Book of Women’s Friendship

British journalist Cooke (Kitchen Person) delivers a rich anthology of fiction, poetry, diaries, and letters exploring friendships between women. Bringing together works by more than 100 writers, including Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Elena Ferrante, and Bernardine Evaristo, Cooke explores how these relationships change over the course of one’s life. Beginning with childhood, excerpts from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Enid Blyton’s First Term at Malory Towers demonstrate, in Cooke’s words, “the agony and the ecstasy of first friendship.” Moving to adulthood, more complex themes emerge; a chapter titled “Shifting Sands” addresses friends’ diverging paths (one gets married or becomes more successful), while “Frenemies & Falling Out” details fights and betrayals, drawing on excerpts from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. Cooke also explores the heartache of saying goodbye when a decades-long companion dies, such as when Mary McCarthy mourned her friend, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a 1976 piece in the New York Review of Books. Throughout, Cooke elucidates poignant truths about the nature of these relationships (“Our friends are mirrors, not mirror images: the more clearly we see them, the more clearly we see ourselves” ). The result is a compassionate meditation on the power of female connection. (Dec.)