B
Genre: Nonfiction
I listened to this book, which I definitely recommend because it is about 6 hours, and it’s read by the author. She’s a comic and writer so her timing and delivery are terrific.
This book is part memoir and part advice on how trauma and childhood insecurity can interfere with your friendship-making and -keeping skills. It’s also about how to identify ways to evaluate and keep good friendships. Important: The book isn’t really about going out to make new friends. It offers advice on how to evaluate the friendships you have, how to help them thrive or allow them to fade, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time on figuring out how to make new friendships.
A lot of the book is spent on ways to evaluate and recognize friendships that aren’t what you want them to be, and how that is okay and normal. Friendships are hard and valuable and, as Moore points out, a LOT a lot of popular culture portrays friendships in ways that are nonsensical when applied to actual humans, who are nuanced and complicated and never simply “good” or “villainous.”
These portrayals are influential to so many people, but they’re also idealized, simplistic, and more often than not plot-driven (You said a thing that hurt me! I will tell you and the music will swell and you will care for me in the exact way that I needed and never articulated! End credits!). It can be reassuring to think, “Someday I will find a friendship like the ones in my favorite movie or show,” but in reality, humans are simply more complicated and have their own issues to untangle. The pop culture fantasy doesn’t match the reality, but it’s also important, Moore says, to think about how those fictional friendships influenced your own views and needs.
And: It’s Okay to Have Needs. “It’s ok to need and want things from your friends,” is a common refrain, one that I appreciated.
The parts I valued most were the tips on evaluating a friendship that maybe isn’t yielding what I need in a relationship and why that might be the case. Some friendships are, to quote the book, “good on paper” but you don’t really click on an fundamental level. Some friendships are about the other person performing what they think is a good friend – regardless of what you think a good friend is.
The book also talks about realizing your own friendship boundaries: no one has to be friends with people who harm or hurt them repeatedly. Nor do you have to be friends with people who are also friends with people who are mean to you. Some people you’ve known forever may grow into ways of being that aren’t compatible with your own – and all of that is normal and it’s okay to walk away. It’s hard, but it is okay.
The part on attachment styles gave me a lot to think about, and I appreciated every time Moore referenced her own traumatic childhood by referencing her first book, How to Be Alone, as further reading. It was funny and charming when she did so, but it also underscored that this book is entirely about friendship, not her life, though her friendships past and present serve as examples and foundations for the points she is making. Her past informs her perspective on her current topic, but the focus is friendships: different types, different outcomes, and different ways of being close to people – some good and not so good.
I actually bookmarked my audiobook for one line: “Empathy is the currency of people who have been there and wish things had gone differently.”
This book is poignant and sad, hopeful and determined, and gave me a lot to think about in terms of looking at my relationships, and examining about how they work. I had more sad feelings and stingy eyes than I expected, especially in the parts that were more memoir than advice, but the advice within resonated with me vigorously. I wish there had been more about the initial connecting with people as potential friends, and how one does that part. The audiobook copy I had also came with bonus material, also recorded by the author, but it had the feeling of being improv-ed in the recording book, and was less polished than the rest of the book, which left the ending of the overall narrative feeling abrupt and incongruous with the rest of it.
I’ve said often that navigating friendship is hard, and that we don’t have a lot of examples and scripts for friendship breakups or downgrading of relationships that seemed like they were doing well. I like this style of memoir that matches commiseration and empathy and care with a solid structure of constructive thinking, advice, and questions to ask.
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Speaking as an old lady, I’d say the friendships you make in your childhood, your teen years, and your early-twenties are the ones likely to stand the test of time and provide life-long connections and support (they’re also the ones much more likely to break your heart if something comes along to end the friendship). I think that after your mid-twenties, you make friends and acquaintances—some of them quite deep and abiding—but they tend to be relationships that come and go, with no hard feelings if you gradually lose connection or interest. Whereas a solidly-rooted friendship that is incredibly hard to dislodge usually goes back decades. It’s not a terrible thing: acquaintances made later in life can still be fulfilling and bring joy, but they tend to be far more superficial than friendships that extend back decades. There are levels of friendship & companionship, and not everyone is going to ride or die for you—or you for them—and that’s ok too.
And, because I’m an old lady, I’ll end my rumination by quoting the queen, Joni Mitchell, from her song “Jericho”:
Anyone’ll tell you
Just how hard it is to make and keep a friend.
Maybe they short-sell you
Or maybe it’s you, Judas in the end.
When you just can no longer pretend
That you’re getting what you need
Or you’re putting out anything
for them to grow and feed on.
It depends a lot on your life, I think.
I had no real friends as a child or in college, just a mixture of frenemies, friendly acquaintances, repeated failed attempts to do friendship, and mostly a lot of gaps where I didn’t really have anyone; in grad school I started being somewhat forcibly befriended and, because I didn’t understand friendship and didn’t think I had a right to boundaries, well, those people didn’t think I did either. All of this was incredibly toxic and ultimately traumatizing, and in my thirties, I cut almost all of those people out of my life in several successive waves. I have exactly two non-familial relationships from before I was thirty; one of them is my therapist, and the other is more of a legacy friendship than anything else. I don’t have many familial relationships either.
But there was some good that came out of the social hell era, because there were a few people, particularly my best friend and her now husband, whom I did manage to meet through that circle. They have stayed, and they are real friends. I don’t think I really understand what friendship was, or that it was actually a positive thing, until I gradually, sort of without noticing, became close to my best friend. She has a more normal assortment of friends acquired through all the various stages of her life, and I will genuinely never understand how or why I became her closest, but life is mysterious, sometimes even in good ways.
I don’t think I could read this book, but Sarah, thank you for this review.
If you want to read up on how to make friends, read Shasta Nelson. She does an excellent job of the topic.
This sounds like a good read for me because I’m trying to determine whether or not to “save” a friendship or just keep it at “I only see you at parties” level of acquaintanceship. The person extremely hurt my feelings, but I feel like I have to keep things polite, so I’ve just mostly disappeared for the last year. I don’t think the person has noticed or had any kind of loss about it, so who’s being hurt here, no one. And yet I’m tired of politely keeping the secret and pretending that I’m “Fine” and we’re “fine” when we ain’t fine. I’m not quite there on blowing it up for good and forever, but I feel like if I openly say we have a problem, then things go kaboombah. As long as I avoid talking to them privately, which so far I have, so good, I guess. Ugh, it all just sucks.
I would have gone lower with this grade. I actually DNFd it. Partially because, as Sarah notes, this book isn’t actually about making friends–it’s more like the author had a lot of stories to tell about how she screwed up friendships at various points in her life, possibly because of her traumatic childhood.
If it had been titled and marketed as a series of essays from someone who had problems keeping friends, but was trying to learn as an adult, that would have been a better fit, although i don’t think i would have read it. It just seemed a little confusing that it was billed as a how-to guide from a woman who admitted up front and then demonstrated through anecdotes that she is terrible at making/keeping friends.