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Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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I loved the structure of the book, with chapters about societal change e.g. "double tap to like" and "ghosting" interspersed with interviews with friends about friendship e.g. "Clemmie: Can friendships withstand big life shifts". Meet Elizabeth Day, recovering “friendaholic”. While she was no queen bee at school, Day became an indiscriminate collector of pals in adulthood, reaching her 40s before questioning the urge. This unabashedly personal book charts her attempts to “course-correct” by analysing the meaning of friendship. She’s helped by five of her closest confidants, including journalist Sathnam Sanghera and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill, with first-person takes from the likes of a neurodivergent Iraqi woman and the sixtysomething chairman of a Norfolk “men’s shed”. It’s a generous, companionable guide to a part of life every bit as crucial – and as fraught – as romance or family. The Women Who Saved the English Countryside

Day’s own experience provides the scaffolding for the book. A childhood in Northern Ireland, where she was an outsider, had a dearth of friends and suffered bullying, left her with an insatiable need to be liked. So, she began collecting friends. “For me, being bullied made me determined in later life to prove my worth,” she writes. “Becoming successful, having my name in print, being blessed with a wide circle of endless friends: these became inviolable markers of my sense of identity.” 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. And that it's not all about how many friends you have but the value you bring to your life.

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For any reader yet to encounter Katherine Heiny, this sparky new story collection provides a joyous introduction. Its title encompasses her protagonists’ antics in pursuit of – or flight from – love. They’re a somewhat jaded bunch with awkward pasts they never seem able to break free of. Nor can they stop yearning. And so a driving examiner only partially succeeds in remaining realistic about her workplace crush; a receptionist wears a taffeta bridesmaid dress to the office; a New York journalist, stranded by snow in her loathed Michigan hometown, finds sozzled closure in an airport bar. The deadpan delivery, the bittersweet wisdom, the sublime farce – it’s all here. The read was cathartic and emotively connective, particularly in defining friendship expectations and how difficult it is to sever one that is not serving you. It was also interesting to consider the language ad expectations of friendship and how they don't always align. But the most moving of all was the passages on losing a friend to death and the terrible loss that brings, especially when they feel like a different kind of soul mate. The grief in that chapter was palpable, You can also use the external lift near the Artists' Entrance on Southbank Centre Square to reach Mandela Walk, Level 2.

The public moralist, the philanthropist, the technocrat and the activist: this is how historian Matthew Kelly characterises the women at the centre of his intriguing group biography. The philanthropist is Beatrix Potter but the others – Octavia Hill, Pauline Dower and Sylvia Sayer – are far less well known. Over a 150-year period, they independently fought to establish the regulatory tools still used to preserve England’s green spaces. Kelly proves a fastidious chronicler of their campaigning and if his prose is sometimes overly academic, it draws vitality from his subjects’ conviction that in alienating ourselves from nature, we curb our own happiness.I liked that phrase, because Joan is who I turn to at the hinges of my own personal history. She has journeyed with me through it all with endless reserves of compassion and kindness. I feel so grateful that the darkest point in my life brought me here, to one of the brightest friendships.

Then, when a global pandemic hit in 2020, she was one of thousands of people forced to reassess what friendship really meant to them. 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. Why was this? Could she rebalance it? Was there such thing as…too many friends? And was she the friend she thought she was?Sam asked me what words would be on my plaque (which wasn't weird - she knows me well). Without hesitation, I said "Friend, swimmer, reader." Sam replied, "Not mother?" And no, 'mother' was not what immediately came to mind. Analyse that whatever way you want... actually, it has come up a few times in my own therapy and I'm no closer to understanding my response, short of saying that my friends always have been, and always will be extremely important to me. I think much of it relates to what I witnessed with my grandmother. I was most interested in the chapters dealing with Friendship and Fertility. Personally, I have also dealt with fertility issues and am childless. I felt I lost friends when they became parents. Other friends avoid all discussions of pregnancy or children around me. Assumable as they do not know what to say around me. So, in the book, I loved reading about another woman's experiences in a similar situation. Suddenly, I felt seen! I realised that I wasn't paranoid and that my fertility issues affected my friendships. It is often said that what passes as left-wing politics these days is just red-washed liberalism, so absolutely has the critique of mass production and mass consumption been abandoned. It is perhaps for this reason that therapy-speak has gained such traction. Rather than recognising it as the language of passive consumerism, it is the left that has most vociferously promulgated therapy-speak – no doubt mistaking it as an instrument of progress. They are yet to discover that the woolly language of therapy works to cushion us from hard but necessary truths. Or that it sets up an impossible series of false expectations about what we are due from this world. They do not discern in the mechanically repeated phrases “that’s so triggering”, or “I feel gaslit”, the whirr of the production line and the chink of the tin as it is lifted off the shelf. As a society, there is a tendency to elevate romantic love. But what about friendships? Aren't they just as – if not more – important?

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