Mauney, Ginger

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Mauney, Ginger

PERSONAL:

Married (husband a veterinarian); children: one son.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Namibia.

CAREER:

Documentary filmmaker in Namibia.

WRITINGS:

(With Sara James) The Best of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wildlife filmmaker Ginger Mauney has had her films broadcast on the National Geographic Channel and the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. In 2007, Mauney, working with her childhood friend Sara James, composed a memoir of their lives, beginning with the time they spent together as girls and continuing through their parallel (yet quite different) careers. The two grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where they were "friends from the age of twelve, when they first shared secrets at a sleepover party," stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Later, the two grew up and went their separate ways, only to reunite after a decade-long absence from one another's lives. While James became an award-winning television journalist, Mauney turned to documentary filmmaking, creating movies that told stories about the animals inhabiting the wild areas of her adopted country, Namibia. In The Best of Friends: Two Women, Two Continents, and One Enduring Friendship, James and Mauney, wrote the Kirkus Reviews contributor, "look back over the years of friendship that sustained them through the ups and downs of their … lives."

The concept for a book on friendship, James revealed in a joint interview with Mauney published on the Web site iVillage, "actually came to me quite suddenly one day when I was on a road trip. It was one of those moments where you mull over life, and think about how you got from where you started to where you are now. In my case," she continued, she was "sitting in a car with a man from 10,000 miles away whom I had just married. And at that moment, it occurred to me that the person who understood that better than anything was my dear friend Ginger, because her life was so similar. Except for the fact that it was absolutely opposite." However, the attraction that drew them back into their friendship, the two authors agree, is based not on the ways in which their lives are now alike, but on their shared past. "They believe that what binds them together," declared Heather Byer in the New York Times Book Review, "is not their great desire to achieve but the durability of a friendship that has lasted decades." "With candor, insight, and wisdom," Carol Haggas wrote in her Booklist review, "James and Mauney joyfully celebrate the inspiring essence of friendship."