Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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I turn to psychologist and professor Paul Wright to sum up the main difference between male and female friendships.

I started off really not liking it and almost put it down, I just thought it came from a really privileged perspective and that wasn’t acknowledged enough - like addiction is a huge illness and saying your addicted to friendship is taking the piss a bit! I really relate to being younger and wanting everyone to like me, I was a chronic people pleaser for sure. It is a reflection of her connection to her friends, a compilation of studies of relationships throughout history.A journalist, broadcaster and bestselling author, Elizabeth Day’s works include the novels Paper, Scissors, Home Fires, Paradise City and The Party. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Because, like Day, I see being a good friend as involving always being there, regardless of how I’m feeling. 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.

Nor does it reveal her astonishing, self-effacing honesty about her own shortcomings, past and present, in dealing with her relationships. Yet you persist with the friendship, driven by the belief that letting it fade would be pretty much a crime against humanity. I saw Elizabeth Day at a book event recently talking about this book, which I'd previously heard of but wasn't sure if I would pick up.I sometimes could relate so well to her expectations and behaviors as a friend, and also on the other side of things friends expected from her as a friend. There’ll be scenarios in this book that you’ll recognise, many of us probably did learn something about relationships during the repeated lockdowns. I wonder if we should maybe look around for someone who likes the quintessential western male-to-male bonding experience before we just openly dismiss male friendship as a fiction. And Day is the best possible guide: funny, moving, helpful and true, Friendaholic deserves a massive audience. Academic and scientific lines of reasoning are used in this book to provide a bit of starch to an otherwise completely subjective book.

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. 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. This allowed me to rethink certain actions that I wasn't ready to fully explore before, gave me the courage to take action on matters I have been postponing within certain friendships, and to embrace certain truths I wasn't able to accept before. ELIZABETH DAY is the author of five novels and three works of non-fiction, including her Sunday Times bestselling novel Magpie , and memoir How to Fail. Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict tells the story of one woman's journey to understand why she's addicted to friendship.In Confessions of a Friendship Addict, Elizabeth Day embarks on a journey to answer these questions.

I loved the exploration of not just what friendship is and means to people but that it's okay to end friendships, just as it is to end other relationships. That I prefer cinema dates to ones in bars and that I don’t do hugs (it’s nothing personal, I just don’t). She is the creator of the award-winning podcast How To Fail With Elizabeth Day , as well as co-host of Best Friend Therapy . Friendship, particularly from a woman's perspective, is a fascinating relationship dynamic and as many of us have, I've been through a journey as I get older on how I value or measure friendship.

Many friends I struggle to see; we all know that joke about friendship in adulthood, it’s constantly saying we need to catch up soon and then six months or a couple of years have passed. This one really digs deep, is bravely revealing and makes me reflect on my own friendship habits, issues, and culture. I’m quite sure that i’m not the only one who has felt the discomfort of self-recognition in its pages, and it’s Day’s skill at delivering those moments of necessary disquiet that make this book feel as though it were written personally for each one of us, like a secret, shared journal in whose pages all our social inadequacies and fears are laid out and then examined with love and compassion, all the pent-up poison extracted and a soothing salve applied. From exploring her own personal friendships and the distinct importance of each of them in her life, to the unique and powerful insights of others across the globe, Elizabeth asks why there isn’t yet a language that can express its crucial influence on our world.