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Oberlin College, 1973. Clare Mann, the daughter of a middle-class Protestant family from Ohio, has never met anyone like her new roommate, Sally Rose. Wealthy, pretty, and Jewish, barely emancipated from her close-knit family in Los Angeles, Sally has been far more exposed to the larger world than Clare, and at the same time far more sheltered from it. Still, she and the hardworking, jaded Clare form an extraordinary friendship that endures for years, through motherhood, disastrous marriages, and demanding careers on opposite coasts.
Best Friends is a story of friendship between women over time - the unexpected turns and directions lives take, the surprising shapes personalities grow into, the changing bond of a relationship itself. Clare is fascinated by Sally's calm probity, her family's seeming perfection, the willful naivete that rules her personal life while ruthlessness governs her law practice. She comes to need Sally the way she has never needed anyone, and her trips to California provide respite from her own family difficulties and her growing responsibilities as a doctor. And yet, as she grows closer to the Roses over the years, especially to Sally's charming, enigmatic father, Clare is stunned to see this once enviable and larger-than-life family reduced to human proportions.
