The purpose of this study was to explore the place of friendship in mentoring relationships among two female literacy education professors and three female doctoral students enrolled at neighboring universities. The authors used West and Oldfather's (1995) pooled case comparison approach to analyze the data from two separate studies: one that was published earlier but that did not consider friendship as a possible factor in the relationship between adviser and advisee, and a second study that was not presented or published before the pooled case comparison. The data for both studies were interpreted through the lens of relational knowing (Hollingsworth "et al.", 1993), a concept that denotes knowledge that is gained through relationships, knowledge that is fluid and knowledge that is influenced by social contexts. The pooled case comparison revealed that friendships did indeed have a place within the participants' evolving mentoring relationships. Interdependency, a salient theme identified within these relationships, functioned in a way that seemed to lessen traditional mentor/mentee hierarchies. This was reflected in the mentors' and mentees' strong desires to support and learn from one another. Interdependency encouraged individual growth while simultaneously facilitating a sense of friendship, collegiality, connectedness and caring between the mentors and mentees. (Contains 1 table.)