Best Friends

When Clare Mann arrives at Oberlin in 1973, she’s never met anyone like Sally Rose. Rich and beautiful, Sally is utterly foreign to a middle-class, Midwestern Protestant like Clare&#151and utterly fascinating. The fascination only grows when Sally brings her home to L.A. Mr. Rose&#151charismatic, charming, and owner of a profitable business shrouded in secrey&#151is nearly as compelling a figure to Clare as he is to his own daughter. California seems like paradise after winters in Ohio. And Clare begins to look forward desperately to these visits, to carefree rides in Sally’s Kharmann Ghia and lazy poolside days.

As the years pass, Clare becomes a doctor and Sally a lawyer, always remaining roommates at heart, a plane ride or phone call away. Marriages and divorces and births and deaths do not separate them. But secrets might&#151for as Clare watches, the Rose family begins to self-destruct before her eyes. And the things she knows are the kinds of things that no one wants to tell a best friend.

Martha Moody's first novel examines the dynamics of friendship between two very different women. Meeting as college roommates, the girls are surprised to learn that, despite their many differences, the two form a bond that will last a lifetime.

Kirkus Reviews

An energetic, if not always persuasive, attempt to detail why a friendship made in college between two women endures despite family scandals, different lifestyles, and the men they marry and divorce. Narrator Clare Man meets Sally Rose in 1973 at Oberlin College, where the two freshmen are assigned to share a room. Wealthy, Jewish Sally comes from California. Protestant, middle-class Clare is a native of Ohio. Sally is devoted to her family, especially father Sid, a publisher, who calls every day. Clare is impatient with her family, especially with her mother, a teacher. Though Clare is a free spirit, Sally more reserved and cautious, the two soon become close friends. Clare's summer visit to the Rose home further cements the attachment; soon Sid, mother Esther, and younger brother Ben become as much her family as Sally's. But there are no perfect families, not even in exciting, warm California. As Clare becomes a doctor, marries and divorces twice, gives birth to a daughter, and works with AIDS patients, the Rose family falls apart. Sally, now a lawyer, marries handsome Flavio, only to find him seducing Ben one day in the pool house. Ben then becomes a heroin addict; Esther commits suicide; and Sally tries to help her brother by buying drugs for him. Eventually, when Clare learns that Sid publishes brutally graphic pornography and may also be implicated in Ben's recent death, she nearly stops seeing Sally. But true friendship survives all kinds of blows (there are more to come, too), and the women enter middle age as close as ever. Newcomer Moody, a Ohio-based physician, is at her best evoking the period, from the last days of college protests to the onset of AIDS. She is lesssuccessful in showing just why Sally was so important to Clare. Despite good intentions, more about the idea of a friendship than the reality.

Martha Moody is a physician. Her short story, Like the Arrival of Angels, was a finalist for the Best American Short Stories of 1985. This is her first novel.