The Seventies

The Seventies is the formative era in which Tully’s longing to be seen and loved takes shape as an ambition to become a reporter, while her friendship with Kate turns that ambition into a shared plan. Revisited through childhood keepsakes, teenage letters, professional hopes, and later recollection, the decade is not merely a setting: it is the beginning of the life story the characters will spend years recording and reinterpreting.

Childhood and the Wish to Be Remembered

On her eleventh birthday, Tully receives a new scrapbook. After Gran leaves, she studies its blank first page and imagines giving the book to her absent mother someday, as proof of what her mother missed. Tully has few photographs of herself and only one of her mother, so the scrapbook begins not as a record of an already full family life but as an attempt to make that life visible to someone who is gone.

She carefully writes the date and starts a letter to her mother. In the years that follow, she collects school and sports pictures, movie-ticket stubs, receipts, and other artifacts, writing about good days and preserving evidence of where she has been. The record also becomes an imagined appeal for approval: she sometimes embellishes her accounts so that her mother might one day be proud of her. The birthday books turn memory into both archive and message, carrying Tully’s hope for recognition forward from one year to the next.

A Dream Takes Shape

A visit to the Mularkey household gives Tully a glimpse of the family life she wishes she had. Watching the news there, she hears Mrs. Mularkey point out Jean Enersen as one of the first women to anchor a nightly news program. Tully responds by declaring that she is going to be a reporter. The moment gives a name and direction to an ambition born amid maternal absence: Enersen becomes a model of what a woman might do, and Tully’s future begins to feel attainable rather than abstract.

The phrase “The next Jean Enersen” becomes Tully’s private mantra. She associates the dream with the day it took root in the Snohomish house and with the pride she believes Mrs. Mularkey feels, a belief sustained by their later letters. Tully and Kate imagine becoming reporters together, following stories and writing them up as a team. The aspiration binds professional possibility to friendship: Tully’s dream is hers, but its imagined fulfillment includes Kate.

Friendship Across Distance

When Tully leaves, Kate watches from the driveway, unable to wave goodbye. For the next three years, the girls exchange letters faithfully, making correspondence more than a habit: it becomes a lifeline between their separate schools. On Sunday evenings, Tully writes at the white desk in her lavender-and-pink bedroom, sharing ordinary details as well as private fears and hopes.

The letters move between teenage life and the deeper wound beneath it. Tully writes about a haircut or a junior-prom dress, but also about sleeplessness and dreams that her mother will return and say she is proud. When Tully’s grandfather dies, Kate’s phone call is the moment that brings her to tears. In writing to Kate, Tully is mostly herself rather than shaping every account for the approval she seeks from her mother. Their correspondence thus offers a different kind of witness: not a hoped-for audience in the future, but a friend who knows her in the present.

Ambition Meets Institutional Delay

By the summer of 1977, Tully and Kate are approaching their senior years at separate schools, while their shared reporting dream remains a guide to Tully’s sense of herself. The narrative then follows that ambition into the University of Washington, where Tully prepares for a network reporting job with disciplined intensity. She takes communications courses, reads at least four newspapers a day, and watches as many newscasts as she can, determined to be ready when an opportunity arrives.

Preparation does not immediately open the door. Tully repeatedly consults her School of Communications adviser, but her youth prevents her from entering upper-level broadcasting and journalism courses. The university’s bureaucratic rules require her to wait her turn, a demand she finds difficult. The obstacle contrasts with the certainty of her dream: desire and effort can prepare her, but cannot simply erase institutional timing.

That drive continues into her sophomore year. Tully takes Chad Wiley’s Broadcast Journalism I and II classes and gives every assignment her full effort, yet his critiques and attention do not provide the recognition she wants. As the term advances, she keeps waiting for him to acknowledge her talent and tell her she is ready for KVTS. The decade’s promise is therefore paired with a recurring test: Tully can imagine the career she wants, but must contend with delay, gatekeeping, and the uncertainty of being judged by others.

The Decade in Retrospect

Later passages place the seventies within a longer story of memory rather than treating the past as settled. In Kate’s dream, she is again a teenager riding her bike at midnight beside her best friend on Firefly Lane, a road that had seemed to lead nowhere before the two girls came to see it through each other’s eyes. The remembered ride returns as a shared landscape, while the dream’s appearance during Kate’s illness connects youthful companionship to the losses and memories pressing on her in the present.

Writing becomes another way of revisiting the decade and the life that followed. Kate opens her journal without knowing exactly where to begin, then reflects that a life story starts out seeming to be about dates, names, and achievements, but that what remains is love, family, and laughter. Her recollection gives the novel’s earlier artifacts and letters a larger significance: they preserve events, but the meaning of a life emerges through the relationships those records cannot reduce to a timeline. The Seventies marks the beginning of that record—and of the friendship that will give its memories their lasting shape.