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Barbara Henning reading from Girlfriend with Martine Bellen, Sally Young, Anele Rubin, Sylvia Rascon, and Miranda Maher.
Often the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women are unseen and vanish from history. In this moving, beautiful book, Barbara Henning captures the delicate web of female friendships: intense, sometimes fragile, frequently sculpted by time and circumstance. Maggie Dubris, BrokeDown Palace
There’s a secret spiral at this book’s throbbing center: the mother-wound as a defining moment as well as a biographical footnote in a much larger life. Oscillating between the very tender and the very cool, Henning pays homage to the constellation of women who have touched her life. She writes, “I was lucky to be a writer and reader” and after reading Girlfriend, I feel lucky, too. Lisa Rogal, la belle indifference
I liked meeting all of Barbara’s friends in this book, I especially liked meeting a few of my friends. One gravitates towards one’s friends, I guess. The piece about Bobbie leapt out at me. She had such a vivid lifeforce. And Maureen in the U shape on the couch. I really enjoyed reading the book, the pace of it, all the recollection, required a different mindset than the one I had been in, and the change was rewarding. Eddie Berrigan, Can It!
Reading Barbara Henning’s Girlfriend, a book-length sequence of epistolary odes to her female friends, I found myself feeling envious of women’s relationships with each other and how vividly Henning describes them. Of one of her 1970s female friendships, she writes—and this I think applies to the rest of the women portrayed—“We were inventing our lives with as much personal and artistic freedom as possible.” And to her daughter, “No matter the difficulties and losses in life, it is all so stunningly beautiful, isn’t it?” What Henning reveals in Girlfriend is how female friendships provide an essential wellspring for that beauty. Ed Friedman, Ideal Boy
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Young Ethel’s, 503 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, United States
