As many of you know, along with Jessica Smock of School of Smock, I am one of the creators of The HerStories Project, a collaborative website that explores the subject of women’s friendship. Last winter, Jessica and I started a blog series about women’s friendship; we were blown away by how many women shared their beautiful, painful, and poignant stories of friendship in this series. After a few months, we created a new website dedicated to featuring these essays.

For the past few months, we’ve maintained radio silence over at The HerStories Project- but it’s not for lack of inspiration! We’ve been working hard, along with 50 contributors, to finish our book, The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship, which will be available in early December as an e-book and paperback!

Along with a foreword by the incomparable Jill Smokler of Scary Mommy, contributions from friendship experts Shasta Nelson of Girlfriend Circles and Carlin Flora, author of Friendfluence, the book includes 50 essays from women writers- including many of your favorite bloggers!

Here is a summary from the back of the book:

Female friendship is an extremely rich and complex topic. The bonds of women’s friendship can be more intimate than marriage, and just as essential to emotional health. From the childhood friend who broke your heart to the college roommate who witnessed you at your highest and lowest, from the lost friendship that ended bitterly to the devoted companion who is still in your life, from the bond that was forged due to shared grief to the shaky connection born with new motherhood, all women have stories to tell about their friendships. The HerStories Project: Women Explore the Joy, Pain, and Power of Female Friendship is a collection of essays from 50 women writers, encompassing tales from the sandbox to the inbox.

You can stop by The HerStories Project here to learn all about the project, find out who our amazing contributors are, and enter a giveaway to kick off the launch of our newly redesigned website!

We are giving away two copies of the book She Matters: A Life in Friendships by Susanna Sonnenberg. This is the book that inspired the entire HerStories series!

We are so excited about this project, and we encourage you to stop by, check out the new website, and enter the giveaway. While you’re over there, we would be thrilled if you would sign up to receive our email newsletter. This will keep you in the loop for all the book release information; we will also share some sneak peeks at the project before the book comes out!

Thanks so much for all your support and enthusiasm as we have developed this series- we hope you are as excited about the book as we are!