Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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I bought this knowing Elizabeth Day from her podcasts—How to Fail and Best Friend Therapy, co-hosted with her best friend Emma Reed Turrell—and thought this would be a bright, breezy, insightful, witty and uplifting book that would leave me with a smile on my face, but probably wouldn’t register very highly on the Richter scale of Important Works of Psychology. Her third, Paradise City was named one of the best novels of 2015 in the Observer and the Evening Standard, and was People magazine's Book of the Week. If you’re in a reflective mood and on friendship high, like I was when I picked this up, then I’d recommend digging in. Over the course of the book, she examines topics such as the effect that the pandemic had on our friendships, why we make friends, friendships between people of very different ages, ghosting, platonic friendships between people of different genders, ‘friendship CVs’, the importance of clarity, frenemies, fertility (this chapter is a truly important piece of work in itself), the effect of big life changes and serious illness, friendship and social media, defining ‘best’ friendships and, perhaps the most unspoken subject, the grief at losing a friend. When one is longing for a family, the effect is profound, it can be hard to be around children, when you’re grieving for something.

Which gets at the other big limitation of the book for me, the outright dismissal of male-to-male friendships. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.And Day is the best possible guide: funny, moving, helpful and true, Friendaholic deserves a massive audience. My only real problem with this book (other than the fact that I didn’t think it was possible for a person to have THIS many friends), is the amount of tangents and metaphors packed into each chapter. I felt it as a symbolic gesture that marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, that is now forever imprinted in my memory, heart and soul.

It’s true that in most cases, there is no dramatic ending or huge falling out, they’ve just naturally come to an end. It means that you have less energy and time for the people you want to be with, the ones who deserve you.I’m not unsociable, far from it, but I’ve realised I don’t need to exhaust myself; friends will understand that and not feel the need to send a passive aggressive WhatsApp. And this is why, for me, the book has been so cathartic, and has delivered repeated punch-in-the-guts moments. As I immersed myself in this book, I felt the urge to complement it with her "Best Friend Therapy" podcast, and I must confess that it created a full circle experience.

Like Day, my friendships are incredibly important to me, regular readers will know that, I’ve written about many of them.She dismisses "activity buddies" and the concept of hobbies in general, while I love hobbies and am always looking for activity buddies (WILL ANYONE GO ICE SKATING WITH ME, I'M NOT KIDDING). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Given that science is used as seasoning it shouldn't be surprising that there is little rigor cast over the facts chosen to support or prompt Day's positions. As a bit of a friendaholic in my past too, there was a lot here I could relate too - anxious attachment style, need to feel loved and valued and fear of rejection.