The Women

The story centers on a group of gossipy, high-society women who spend their days at the
beauty salon and haunting fashion shows. The sweet, happily-wedded Mary Haines finds her
marriage in trouble when shop girl Crystal Allen gets her hooks into Mary's man. Naturally, this
situation becomes the hot talk amongst Mary's friends.
To her New York society friends, Mary Haines is the perfect woman. She is kind,
considerate, and is able to balance her work life as a designer for her father's family business
with her role as loving wife of thirteen years to renowned Wall Street businessman Stephen
Haines and mother to preteen Molly Haines, all the while still being able to do volunteer work.
But slowly, the problems in Mary's life, which she was previously unaware of, start to show
themselves. Instead of her father handing over the family business to her as she expects, he
instead fires her, believing her work is not of quality since she is spreading herself too thinly
over all that she does. Worse, she finds that Stephen is cheating on her with a gold digging Saks
perfume counter girl named Crystal Allen, of which her core group of friends are aware. As she
still loves Stephen, Mary has to figure out what to do, with much advice from those friends and
her mother, who knows more about what she's going through than Mary would have suspected.
As Mary deals with this issue wallowing in her self pity, her best friend since college, magazine
editor Sylvie Fowler, is facing her own professional problems, which impact what happens to
Mary. It isn't until Mary meets agent Leah Miller at a retreat that Mary begins to figure out what
she truly wants in life, how to achieve it, and what part she played in the cause of her own
problems, not only with Stephen.