Intimate Friends

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Lynne Craig believes that all is well with her world, barring the usual frets and worries that beset any working wife, up to the shattering moment in which she discovers her husband’s body lying in their bed. A suicide, he has not even left a note to explain his action or to soften the blow.

The impact upon her life is complete. Intimate Friends is the story of her initially shaky but increasingly purposeful efforts to put her life back on a new set of rails. This she accomplishes through her career in television, her friendship with another professional woman, and two oddly contrasting love affairs — one with a mature man, a lonely widower seeking sympathetic companionship, and the other with a man years younger than herself, with whom she reaches passionate fulfillment. It is a balancing act that cannot be indefinitely prolonged; she must choose one or the other.

A bit of a weeper at times, but no mere soap opera for all that.