Following the suicide of an outwardly successful neighbor, her friends begin to deal with the problems in their personal lives.

Next, besides the memoir and the sequel with Raymond Tyler, is a novel about a reunion of friends who are outwardly successful but battle some stubborn inner demons.

Yates was a kind of prose laureate of failure, and Russo's stories insistently fish for failure beneath the surface of outwardly successful lives.

Though outwardly successful, Alabama and David are miserable.

They're bright, carefree, aggressive, outwardly successful people, hard workers to the point of being workaholics.

One morning in May 1982, the middle-aged, outwardly successful president of Charles County Community College in Maryland, not far from Washington, simply left.

Mr. Alexander's character, married to a white woman, is a dashing, outwardly successful television cameraman.

The main character, though outwardly successful, still struggles to understand meaning in his life, exploring personal satisfaction in the post-modern, developed world.

Neither realizes that the other, though outwardly successful, secretly feels a failure.

"The Special Relationship during the 1940's was in part," he explains, "like a lot of outwardly successful marriages, an abusive relationship."