Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of Meg Waite Clayton's beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family.

For thirty-five years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967. These "Wednesday Sisters" seem to have little in common: Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of both literature--Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens--and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year.

As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers circle to express their hopes and dreams through poems, stories, and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making: Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a women's movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves, while at the same time supporting one another through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success.

Humorous and moving, The Wednesday Sisters is a literary feast for book lovers that earns a place among those popular works that honor the joyful, mysterious, unbreakable bonds between friends.

From the Hardcover edition.

That's us, there in the photograph. Yes, that's me--in one of my chubbier phases, though I suppose one of these days I'll have to face up to the fact that it's the thinner me that's the "phase," not the chubbier one. And going left to right, that's Linda (her hair loose and combed, but then she brought the camera, she was the only one who knew we'd be taking a photograph). Next to her is Ally, pale as ever, and then Kath. And the one in the white gloves in front--the one in the coffin--that's Brett.

•••

Brett's gloves--that's what brought us together all those years ago. I had Maggie and Davy with me in the park that first morning, a park full to bursting with children running around together as if any new kid could join them just by saying hello, with clusters of mothers who might--just might--be joined with a simple hello as well. It wasn't my park yet, just a park in a neighborhood where Danny and I might live if we moved to the Bay Area, a neighborhood with tree-lined streets and neat little yards and sidewalks and leaves turning colors just like at home in Chicago, crumples of red and gold and pale brown skittering around at the curbs. I was sitting on a bench, Davy in my lap and a book in my hand, keeping one eye on Maggie on the slide while surreptitiously watching the other mothers when this woman--Brett, though I didn't know that then--sat down on a bench across the playground from me, wearing white gloves. No, we are not of the white-glove generation, not really. Yes, I did wear them to Mass when I was a girl, along with a silly doily on my head, but this was 1967--we're talking miniskirts and tie-dyed shirts and platform shoes. Or maybe not tie-dye and platforms yet--maybe those came later, just before Izod shirts with the collars up--but miniskirts. At any rate, it was definitely not a white-glove time, much less in the park on a Wednesday morning.

What in the world? I thought. Does this girl think she's Jackie Kennedy? (Thinking "girl," yes, but back then it had no attitude in it, no "gi-rl.") And I was wondering if she might go with the ramshackle house beyond the playground--a sagging white clapboard mansion that had been something in its day, you could see that, with its grandly columned entrance, its still magnificent palm tree, its long, flat spread of lawn--when a mother just settling at the far end of my bench said, "She wears them all the time."

Those were Linda's very first words to me: "She wears them all the time."

I don't as a rule gossip about people I've never met with other people I've never met, even women like Linda, who, just from the look of her, seemed she'd be nice to know. She was blond and fit and . . . well, just Linda, even then wearing a red Stanford baseball cap, big white letters across the front and the longest, thickest blond braid sticking out the back--when girls didn't wear baseball caps either, or concern themselves with being fit rather than just plain thin.

"You were staring," Linda said. That's Linda for you. She's nothing if not frank.

"Oh," I said, still stuck on that baseball cap of hers, thinking even Gidget never wore a baseball cap, not the Sandra Dee movie version or the Sally Field TV one.

"I don't mean to criticize," she said. "Everyone does."

"Criticize?"

"Stare at her." Linda shifted slightly, and I saw then that she was pregnant, though just barely. "You're new to the neighborhood?" she asked.

"No, we . . ." I adjusted my cat's-eye glasses, a nervous habit my mom had forever tried to break me of. "My husband and I might be moving here after he finishes school. He has a job offer, and we . . . They showed us that little...

 

"This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!"

 

"I read The Wednesday Sisters in one delicious gulp. With a smart, entrancing voice, Meg Waite Clayton sweeps us into the world of the tumultuous 1960's and beyond, and gives us the gift of five young women coming into their own as friends, mothers, wives and writers. The Wednesday Sisters takes their writing group as its core, and up until the last page, I found myself fervently rooting for each of them as if they were my friends too."

 

"Long before there were book clubs and play dates, there were the Wednesday Sisters--a group of women whose shared love of literature transports them above the pains and pitfalls of ordinary life. While these women may seem like typical suburban housewives, each character has an intriguing secret and a rich interior life that drew me into the story and held me there. This remarkable group of women demonstrates that no matter what period of history in which we live, no matter what race, creed or class we are, no matter what pains we endure, our one unifying salvation can be books. And this book reminded me of why I love to read."

 

"Meg Waite Clayton gives us a group of spunky women--mostly young, married mothers--who make the unlikely decision in 1967 to form a writers' group. Their diverse journeys over the next years in their writing and in their lives add up to a compelling and deeply moving testament to the power of women's friendships. I simply couldn't put The Wednesday Sisters down until I'd turned the last page."

 

"Richly intelligent, deeply felt and incandescently original, Clayton's book is a rhapsodic story of female friendship, set against wildly changing times and mores. Not only is the book heartbreaking, funny, and undeniably smart, but truly, this is the kind of book you don't just want to pass on to all your friends. You have to."

 

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Runner's World, Writer's Digest, and literary magazines. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons.

From the Hardcover...