I received an Advance Listening Copy of this book thanks to the publisher and Libro.fm. All opinions are my own.
I didn’t know anything about this book when it popped up on Libro.fm but I find I’m often drawn to depictions of women’s friendship in books and so I clicked on this one. While Bad Friend is not a fictional book, it was absorbing and informative.
Tiffany Watt Smith embarks on a history of women’s friendship. An ambitious and somewhat impossible undertaking but a fascinating one to follow her on. As Smith tells us, the history of friendship, especially among women, is not one that’s been heavily documented. When friendships began to be more featured in western literature and art, it was more often men’s friendships that were elevated while women were seen to be less capable of such deep connections. Smith takes us through this history and the depictions of friendships in media into the present day where, generally, our society views women as better at making and keeping friends. I found this shift in attitude an interesting one to learn about. While Smith’s work does focus largely on the West (she’s English) she takes care to provide examples of friendship and its expectations and traditions in other parts of the world and among minority groups in England today. While not comprehensive, I appreciated that she clearly made an effort to keep Bad Friend from being a history of white women’s friendships in England.
Interspersed with the history parts are anecdotes of Smith’s own experiences with friendship. The friendship that painfully fizzles out as their lives travel different paths in their 20s. The elderly neighbour who Smith begins to care for as her health fades. The mom friend she makes when they both have very young children and the intensity of the years in which they heavily rely on one another. With each of these personal stories, Smith delves into what these sort of friendships can look like and what they mean. The book talks about the ebbs and flows of women’s friendships. The intensity of girlhood friends and the intertwined lives of teens and young adults. Then the ways that these friendship can separate, sometimes painfully, as women enter marriages and motherhood. Smith looks at various women and groups who have lived together and relied on each other through the struggles of raising young children and the communities that some have created as an alternative to the nuclear family.
The book is full of interviews and excerpts, from letters to novels, which provides more than simply Smith’s own perspective but at each stage she keeps it focused on the personal, either her own or whoever’s story she is sharing. At each segment, it was easy to draw parallels to my own friendships throughout the years. I was pleased to read that some studies show women’s friendship to get even better as women age into their 40s and beyond (I’m 41) and reading about friendship in this broader sense offered me some perspective on my own past relationships.
This topic might not appeal to every reader and if the idea of a history of women’s friendship isn’t already drawing you in, you probably won’t enjoy Bad Friend. But if you find yourself at all thinking about a friend you had and no longer do while reading this review, Bad Friend might have something to offer.
The Audiobook was narrated by the author.
This does sound interesting! At first, I thought it was going to be a history of friendship in fiction, like works by LM Montgomery or Terry McMillan. Then I thought it was going to be famous historical friendships because it’s a “history of.” This sounds more like interviews of people today? Did I get that right?
She doesn’t touch on friendship in fiction but she does delve into historical friendships through letters and various feminist movements. And then the modern day stuff is more interviews and her own personal experiences. I do think you would enjoy this.