Reflections on a friendship initiated 40 years ago in high school
and reestablished across an ocean and a great cultural and
spiritual divide. Banner (In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and
Sexuality, 1992) and her friend Fran gravitated to each other in
Inglewood (Calif.) High School, where football players were heroes
and pom-pom girls their consorts. Banner and her friend were
athletic, academic, and ambitious - that is, out of the popular
mainstream. They supported and nurtured each other, with Fran's
mother, Lydia, an artist and musician, providing inspiration for
Banner, whose mother had died. The two friends' paths diverged at
college, with Banner moving on to graduate school in New York City,
an upwardly mobile marriage, and feminism. Fran's path was
spiritual; with her first husband, she helped to found the Lama
community in New Mexico and ultimately converted to Islam, settling
with a second husband in Alexandria, Egypt, changing her name to
Noura, and wearing the veil of the Muslim woman. How could two
friends, so similar in adolescence, have taken such different
paths? asks Banner. She doesn't answer that question exactly, but
in the attempt she describes the bridge generation of women who
came of age in the late 1950s, already rattling the cage of June
Cleaver but not yet free of primary commitment to home, husband,
and children. Banner is now, she says, a pupil, if not a devotee,
of a Sufi practice once popular at Fran's Lama community. Exploring
the past that brought them to these crossroads, Banner delves into
family histories. Disturbed by Fran/Noura's willingness to submit
herself to her husband, Banner is nevertheless encouraged by a new
view of Muslim women, exemplified by Fran and by Jihan Sadat, that
permits them to think, study, and act as powerful individuals. A
spiritual quest that encompasses the roots of family and friendship
- it will resonate with the women of Banner's generation and
beyond. (Kirkus Reviews)
On a cool summer evening in the desert between Taos and Santa
Fe, two women lean on pillows, sip coffee, and discuss their past.
One is a professor of history and gender studies and has been a
feminist and an agnostic throughout most of her adult life. The
other is a devout Muslim of the mystical Sufi Order. What brings
two such different women together? Attending high school in 1950s
suburban Los Angeles, Lois Banner and Fran Huneke had been best
friends, with their minds on books and boys. But while Banner
became an academic feminist, Fran converted to Islam and moved to
Egypt. Forty years later, Banner sought out her lost friend, hoping
to understand why they had taken such different paths in life.
Banner charts the trajectories of the friends' diverging lives.
Her search for clues to the origins of their opposing choices takes
her to Los Angeles, New York, New Mexico, and to Egypt with Fran,
where each woman re-creates the key moments of her life. As Banner
finished her Ph. D. in history at Columbia and became swept up in
the beginnings of academic feminism, Fran embarked on her own
journey, joining the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community in New
Mexico, and eventually converted to Islam. Ultimately, however, it
is in childhood that Banner finds the roots of their differences.
She uncovers the importance of female role models, showing how the
death of her own mother, and the tremendous strength and influence
of Fran's, sowed the seeds of their disparate lives.
This is also the story of Banner's own spiritual journey. In the
course of reconnecting with Fran, she goes to Lama and explores
alternatives to the Protestantism of her own childhood. She
undergoes a conversion of sorts and joins the Sufi Order in the
West, a spiritual group in Los Angeles.
Exploring the intersections of biography and autobiography, East
and West, faith and reason, "Finding Fran" is a unique portrait of
two women's lives that accounts for the tremendous differences
between people, even as it reveals the enduring ties of
friendship.
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