Their shared dream of careers in television news

Their shared dream of careers in television news is the imagined future that first gives Tully a direction and then binds her to Kate: the two friends will become reporters together. It is at once Tully’s genuine vocation and a story of shared destiny that Kate eventually cannot inhabit. Their divergence shows how a dream can offer purpose and intimacy while also making it difficult to admit that two lives are moving toward different ends.

A dream takes shape

The idea begins in the Mularkey home, where Tully watches the family’s evening news. Mrs. Mularkey points to Jean Enersen as a woman changing the world by becoming one of the first women to anchor a nightly newscast. Tully responds with a sudden declaration that she will be a reporter. Mr. Mularkey welcomes the ambition. For Tully, whose experience of family has been marked by absence, the moment joins the warmth of the household to a newly imaginable future; the news offers a model of work in which a woman can be visible and consequential.

The ambition soon acquires a private shorthand: becoming the next Jean Enersen. Tully treats those words as a mantra, a way to make an enormous dream feel attainable. The goal changes how she understands herself, replacing the sense of being poor, motherless, and abandoned with an identity organized around what she might achieve. Letters from Mrs. Mularkey reassure her that the family is proud of her, and Tully believes that Kate shares the same destination. The future is not simply a job but a partnership: they will track down stories and write them up as a team.

That partnership gives the ambition emotional force. Tully has taken Kate’s hand when nobody else would, and Kate remembers that history when she begins to doubt the plan. Their dream grew out of a childhood bond, so questioning the career also feels like questioning the shared life they once pictured. The promise that they will enter television news together turns professional aspiration into a language of loyalty.

Tully’s pursuit of the work

At the University of Washington, Tully treats preparation as a discipline. The university’s scale does not daunt her; she believes that succeeding there will prove she can succeed anywhere. She takes core communications courses, reads at least four newspapers a day, and watches as many newscasts as she can. She repeatedly consults her School of Communications adviser to map out her studies, insisting on answers when she has questions.

Her progress, however, is constrained by her age and by the university’s course structure. She cannot enroll in upper-level broadcasting or journalism classes until she is old enough, and persistence cannot make the institution move faster. Waiting is a particular frustration: the ambition is ready before the available opportunity. Tully’s preparation thus involves not only mastering the field but enduring a delay she cannot overcome by force of will.

By the end of her sophomore year, she is taking Chad Wiley’s Broadcast Journalism I and II courses and throwing herself into every assignment. In class, she reads the news from a teleprompter and waits for Chad to recognize her ability. His responses are brief criticisms rather than encouragement, and he does not tell her she is ready for KVTS. Tully nevertheless continues to expect a breakthrough, treating the internship as the next necessary step toward the career she has already imagined in detail.

When she gets the internship, she presents it as a beginning for both women. She will work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with some weekends, and promises Kate that she will persuade the station to hire her by graduation. The prospect appears to confirm the old plan: one friend’s first opening will become the route into the business for them both. Tully is so certain that they remain a team that she interprets Kate’s hesitation as a joke, embraces her, and leaves to tell Chad about the interview.

The work itself reinforces Tully’s confidence. She assists on copy for a report about a legal case connected to the Spokane rapist case, and the station uses one sentence she has written. She is also allowed to accompany a reporter to an interview with a computer inventor. Tully describes these assignments to the Mularkeys as evidence that she is on her way, then extends the promise again: she will get Kate an internship, and someday they will both appear on television as the first pair of female anchors on a network news program. The language has shifted from reporters to anchors, but the essential image remains two friends succeeding together.

Kate’s changing ambitions

Kate’s confidence and social ease grow during university, but her sense of professional purpose does not develop in parallel with Tully’s. By November 1981, she privately recognizes that network news production or first-rate reporting may not suit her. She imagines other futures: law school and work against injustice, writing novels that could help people see the world differently, or falling in love. What makes this difficult to say is not simply uncertainty about a career. She fears telling the friend who first took her hand and dreamed aloud of their lives as television-news partners.

Kate’s silence persists even as the shared plan becomes more concrete. During their senior year, Tully spends more than twenty-five hours a week at the station, while Kate works a comparable number of hours at Starbucks in Pike Place Market. They still spend much of their weekend time together, but Kate is also dating and does not challenge Tully over her relationship with Chad. She expects to graduate with honors and a degree in communications and broadcast journalism, yet the approaching graduation makes the concealed discrepancy harder to ignore: the credential reflects their old plan, not necessarily her own desire.

When Kate finally tries to explain herself to her mother, she describes the central conflict plainly. She does not eat, sleep, and breathe the news as Tully does. Though she earns top grades and her professors like her, she sees journalism as a competitive field in which someone as driven as Tully could outpace her. Her fear that she will be eaten alive by people willing to do anything for a scoop makes the shared career feel less like a future she wants than a test she expects to fail. Her mother challenges the idea that realism should govern a young woman’s choices, contrasting Kate’s opportunities with her own constrained working life and urging her to dream big. But encouragement cannot decide which dream is actually Kate’s.

By the time Tully is leaving for an interview, Kate has a more immediate reason to stay: Johnny. She knows that she should stop the assumption that they will build a dual future in news, both because she no longer wants to follow Tully and because she does not want to leave her job. She also recognizes that her hope of having a chance with Johnny if Tully is gone is uncertain. Her imagined future has become more centered on him and less on broadcasting, a preference she feels she cannot readily admit in a culture that tells women to postpone marriage and children for professional advancement.

Partnership, separation, and legacy

Tully’s certainty continues to press against Kate’s unspoken change of heart. After the interview, Tully talks about their childhood plan and says that once she has an anchor position, she will make sure the station hires Kate as a reporter. Kate knows she should finally put the brakes on this joint future. The phrase of partnership, once a source of excitement, now risks making her own choice seem like a betrayal. Tully’s belief that they are still on their way together leaves little room for Kate to correct the story without confronting the friendship beneath it.

The dream nevertheless has a real history of shared action, not just a promise. Tully’s internship turns the imagined career into daily work, and Kate remains close to her as that work develops. But their commitment is asymmetrical: Tully experiences television news as an all-consuming vocation, while Kate increasingly looks toward other forms of fulfillment. The difference is not that one friend succeeds and the other simply fails. It is that the same childhood picture has come to mean something different to each of them, and Kate must separate affection for Tully from an obligation to follow her.

In later chapters, Tully’s career demonstrates both the reach and the cost of the ambition that began in the Mularkey kitchen. She becomes a prominent television journalist and, after moving to New York, has for years risen at 3:30 a.m. for work. Success brings more assignments, appearances, and demands rather than an easier pace; the more she achieves, the more she wants and fears losing. Her career eventually extends from reporting into television celebrity and business ownership, with her program shared between Tully, Syndiworld, and the Ryans, while Tully remains its driving force. These developments fulfill the dream of a woman becoming a powerful presence on television, but not the original image of the two friends arriving there together.

The dream’s later echoes also make the news camera less straightforwardly triumphant. Tully’s reporting on Johnny’s severe head trauma in Baghdad brings a private crisis before viewers, while her documentary about her own experiences of disappointment and abandonment changes how the public sees her: viewers recognize the person behind the professionally detached journalist. The resulting attention strengthens her celebrity. These episodes do not erase the ideal she formed around women’s presence in news, but they show how the profession can turn intimate lives into public narratives and professional recognition into another demand.

The shared dream therefore matters both as a beginning and as a measure of change. It gives Tully a purpose sturdy enough to counter her sense of abandonment, and it gives the girls a language for imagining that their friendship will continue into adult life. Yet the promise cannot make their aspirations identical. Kate’s struggle to say that she wants another future reveals the emotional price of treating loyalty as sameness; Tully’s extraordinary achievement, meanwhile, fulfills the individual ambition that once seemed inseparable from a joint one. What survives is not the exact future they planned, but the formative bond and the question the plan leaves behind: whether friendship requires walking the same road, or making room for each other to choose different ones.