In a sense, friendship becomes either a replacement for or a complement to the traditional family in much feminist fiction. The narrator is a woman from Kentucky who decides to change her life and start over, even to the point of finding a new name based on wherever she runs out of gas. This story is balanced against that of Lou Ann, told in the third person rather than the first. She lives in Arizona and has been left alone and pregnant when her husband, after a rodeo accident, loses both one leg and most of his confidence before leaving. The two women come together and form the core of a new family group.
The two women are very different and represent complementary sides of the female psyche as it has developed in American society. The two are from the same level of society--both are poor an
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