Tully Hart

Tully Hart is the larger-than-life, desperately ambitious co-protagonist of Kristin Hannah's novel Firefly Lane — a television journalist who builds a career on talent, drive, and an absolute refusal to be limited by anyone else's expectations, while carrying the specific damage of a childhood defined by an absent, unstable mother. Hannah tells Tully's story across four decades of her friendship with Kate Mularkey, the two women's lives intertwined in ways that reveal how much the people we love shape who we become.

Hannah writes Tully as the more publicly successful of the two women — the famous one, the one who seems to have everything — while giving her an inner life defined by the kind of loneliness that success cannot address. Her hunger for love, which she has learned to disguise as hunger for achievement, is the wound the novel traces across the decades of her friendship with Kate.

The Netflix adaptation starring Katherine Heigl as Tully and Sarah Chalke as Kate brought the novel to a new global audience, and the series demonstrates Hannah's particular skill at depicting female friendship as the central relationship of adult life rather than a supporting element of a romantic plot.

Begin with Firefly Lane (2008) and continue with Fly Away.