Girlfriends is a celebration of women's friendships in poetic prose, including mentors, characters and authors whose writing was important to her. One by one, the story emerges of a working-class women who looses her mother as an adolescent and becomes a mother heself, as well as a poet, a novelist and a professor. In Henning's friendship world--the bohemian communities of Detroit and New York City--one meets artists, poets, fiction writers, literary critics, activists, mothers, yoga practitioners and teachers, among many others.