Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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The tendency to quote Day's conversations with friends verbatim adds more bloat to an already bloated book.

It is an honest account of different types of friendships we encounter in our lives, from ghosting to best friends and everything in between. Já tinha este livro debaixo de olho há algum tempo, desde que me cruzei com a capa lindíssima da versão original nas estantes da Salted Books. I can sense that she will be routinely criticised for being a wealthy white women trying to explore her friendships in a first world country where she wants for very little.She suggests, not quite jokingly, that it might be a good idea to send potential friends the equivalent of a pre-nup before agreeing to a first coffee date. 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. It means that you have less energy and time for the people you want to be with, the ones who deserve you. I do think there’s room for a follow up, because aside from the workplace or toddler groups, I have no idea how to meet friends when you’re older. If you have more than seven then you are likely to suffer exhaustion from trying to juggle everyone’s needs.

In India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, people reported having three times the number of best friends as those in Australia, Europe and the US. Then, when a global pandemic hit in 2020, she was one of thousands of people forced to reassess what friendship really meant to them - with the crisis came a dawning realisation: her truest friends were not the ones she had been spending most time with. There are some neat observations- I particularly liked the references to the solar system - but these are buried beneath a marshmallow of slightly self-indulgent waffle. My preference is for once-a-month meet-ups with an option to consider a mini-break in Prague if things go well.Dealing with narcissistic lovers or recalcitrant teenagers has been deemed proper subject matter for academic psychologists and therapists for decades; how to cope with the potential ending of a friendship has, by comparison, been seen as rather trivial, just one of those things in life that we are supposed to navigate without guidance. The title makes more sense after reading it, she’s very open about her need for friendships… and I understand it’s a confessional; but I think she missed the opportunity to put herself in other people’s shoes and help those that have no friends, or struggle to make/maintain deep friendships. And also Day brings her lovely writing style of honesty and humour which meant I devoured this in just a few days!

I'd love to read a considered, thoughtful book on friendship by an author who really has something to say. I needed a reference to turn to every time Ellen but not Ellie or Lizzie, or Lisa, or Lou popped into the narrative. Intertwined within the book are the "Friendship Tapes," various interviews with other people about their feelings in friendships.My cleverest friend thinks you should cultivate loads of them, do all the emotional stuff on sosh media and throw one party a year to control the spend.