Succeeds On So Many Levels

Girl Most Likely by Sheila Williams

Sheila Williams' Girls Most Likely demands an immediate adjective. Something like elegant or compelling or soulful. Perhaps gripping or mesmerizing or enthralling. But while all of those adjectives would work, they must be rejected as inadequate.

Girls Most Likely is, indeed, something special. Perhaps that is because it appears to be one thing while slowly revealing itself to be something more. On one level, it is a perfectly ordinary book. It tells the story of four women, four friends, from when they meet in fifth grade to their 30th high school reunion. They maintain a fast friendship, albeit with some pretty major fissures, protecting each other and each other's secrets.

On another level, it's a richly lyrical and metaphorical book which looks with great affection upon four decades in the lives of four archetypical examples of womanly success. It's a book of ideas and of relationships. It's a book about our definitions of success and how we hollow ourselves out in pursuit of those elusive pictures.

The four friends, while richly drawn as very human women, are also representative. One could almost map them out on a Myers-Briggs diagram:

Vaughn, the INFP, is the writer who glues all the women together. She is an esoteric one who is never quite convinced of her own worthiness, seeing herself as the other women's shadow, an eloquent observer of their lives.

Reenie (Irene), the ESFP, is the blunt dreamer who forges ahead with her plans in a hedonistic fashion. She's beautiful and sassy, always ready to assert herself oblivious to the effect it might have on others.

Su (Susan), ENTJ, is glamorous and her voice impresses people from her childhood on. She is also the lonely child, the one seeking stability and devotion. She's a beautiful woman who is distrustful and dragged down by her past even as she begins to achieve television stardom.

Audrey, ISTJ, is a perfectionist and overachiever, driven to a sterile corporate success by the ghost of her militaristic father. She is fearful of failure and always trying to please. She outwardly portrays perfection, because anything less than that is failure.

What becomes magical about this book is that every woman can find something to identify with in one of the characters. No matter what one's background or personality, one of the women will resonate. And once that resonance occurs, one starts to love the other characters' through that woman's eyes.

This book explores many themes. Perhaps the most obvious is the one referred to in the title. It isn't so much about what the girls are, but what they were most likely to be. It takes a hard look at expectations and how the fulfillment of those expectations can drive one in totally unexpected directions and until one changes the picture of one's expectations, one can suffer from bitterness, loneliness, and paralyzing stress. Eventually, each of them fulfill the "most likely to" tag that they were early on labeled with, but not in the ways that anyone expected. Each had to find that it was not the expectations of childhood and childhood authority figures that mattered, but what they could make of their lives and their relationships.

The themes are explored through events that many women struggle with: teenage pregnancy, miscarriages, divorces, anorexia, corporate pressure, jealousy, and loneliness. The book spans from cheerleading tryouts to corporate assassinations, high school dances to grandparenthood.

While each woman was distinctly drawn, the narratives were not always as discrete as the characters. The book is divided into four sections-each one told from the viewpoint of a different woman. While this is a nice device, the separate voices came through only in the dialogues, not in the internal reflections. Vaughn, the first and last narrator, saw them all more incisively than they saw themselves.

Williams manages to write her book with a delightful lack of bitterness. These are women who have gone through hardships, but there is no railing at the world for their disappointments.

In Vaughn's narrative, she touches upon watershed events that occurred from 1963 forward and talks about how they, almost unnoticing, went from being colored/Negro to black to African American. Rennie observes the stereotyping and condescension Vaughn suffers at college, when professors assume that she was "disadvantaged" because of her skin color. Likewise, Su and Audrey face discrimination, though it is as much from being a woman as it is from being black.

While the four women in this book are black, it isn't a story about black women the way a book by Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou might be. It's a book about women and the experiences that they share are universal, making them accessible to all women of all races-though primarily to those who grew up in the 60s and 70s in the United States.

Girls Most Likely is a poignant book that deserves to stand next to such books as The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Robber Bride in its intensity and insightfulness.

--B. Redman