Big Friendship

I love books about platonic friendship. A lot. I think we don't talk about the value of friendship enough, and I read this while staying in a house with my college best friends, having gathered at no amount of financial, emotional and time investment to see our core friend group. So, this book should have been up my alley. But while Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman attempt to review the academic literature on friendship, this is a very superficial portion of the book. Most of the book is specifically about Aminatou and Ann's friendship in particular. I like that they wrote about being friends through difficult times and how to handle to dissolution of friendship, as well as focusing on how to maintain friendships via facing conflict and finding ritual, all of which are part of my core friendship values. But I just ...didn't like them. I have the sense that I'd like Sow or Friedman individually (and I have when I've heard them on podcasts) but their friendship based on alcohol and girly TV and fashion and being “low drama mamas” (I've found people who declare themselves low drama are (a) almost always not and (b) toxically conflict-averse) was something that made me want to run for the hills.

I liked this! Easy going, much more narrative than directive, but highly relatable. It was a nice palette cleanser.

A lovely story of a friendship and those two individuals have remained committed to the friendship through the challenges life and emotional intimacy throw at all of us. Highly recommend!

I think I need to call it, at least for now. I've been reading this for the entirety of July and am still only 40-ish pages in, and it's keeping me from reading other things. I was hoping this would be more about friendship in general, and HOW to keep friendships close (especially since I just moved across the country), but I think the subtitle is meant to evoke just the authors' friendship with each other, rather than how to apply this to one's own friendships.