New Delhi, April 1 -- When Iris Rainer Dart's daughter was in nursery school in the late 1980s, she kept noticing an odd thing happening with her mom and finally confronted her.

"She came to me one day and she said, 'Mommy, why do all the other mothers come up to you and say, 'I cried'?" Dart recalls. "I said, 'Well, Mommy wrote a story that makes people cry.' She didn't think that was so great."

A lot of people, respectfully, disagree. That story was "Beaches," which celebrates the deep bonds of female friendship as it traces the decades-long intertwined lives of two very different women, the messy Cee Cee Bloom and buttoned-up Bertie White.

"Women's friends are the ones who get them through this life," Dart says. "Husbands are great,...