Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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This is a very personal and relatable account of cultivating and maintaining friendships throughout challenging times and phases of life - not always a smooth or rewarding process, which will resonate with many readers, as with myself. It means that you have less energy and time for the people you want to be with, the ones who deserve you.

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! So I said I wouldn't criticise the book for not being what I wanted it to be but then I went and did that anyway. Nor does it reveal her astonishing, self-effacing honesty about her own shortcomings, past and present, in dealing with her relationships. From the journalist and author of How to Fail comes a disarmingly honest and perceptive investigation into the nature of friendship, prompted by Day's lockdown reassessment of her need for a large group of companions. Over the course of the book, she examines topics such as the effect that the pandemic had on our friendships, why we make friends, friendships between people of very different ages, ghosting, platonic friendships between people of different genders, ‘friendship CVs’, the importance of clarity, frenemies, fertility (this chapter is a truly important piece of work in itself), the effect of big life changes and serious illness, friendship and social media, defining ‘best’ friendships and, perhaps the most unspoken subject, the grief at losing a friend.Acabei por me relacionar muito com algumas das lutas travadas pela autora neste campo da sua vida, e consegui tirar alguns ensinamentos destas páginas.

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. Perceptive, compassionate and filled with relatable insights into all that is beautiful about friendship, with its most valuable point being that it should be about quality, rather than quantity. Given that science is used as seasoning it shouldn't be surprising that there is little rigor cast over the facts chosen to support or prompt Day's positions.Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day is a mix of self-help and nonfiction books as Elizabeth tells stories from her personal life when discussing different types of friendships. 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.

Elizabeth explores so much about what constitutes real friendship and why so much of it can be just as deep and rewarding, as well as challenging, as romantic relationships. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we don’t care what others think about us, no one wants to be thought of as a total twat. And Day is the best possible guide: funny, moving, helpful and true, Friendaholic deserves a massive audience. 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.

Amidst birthday joy, thesis submission anxiety, and bittersweet farewells, this book was placed in my hands by my beloved friends. Reading this book and the experiences Day shares, made me feel seen and reinforced the idea of it being perfectly, fine (and healthy) to set boundaries. That I prefer cinema dates to ones in bars and that I don’t do hugs (it’s nothing personal, I just don’t). Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict tells the story of one woman's journey to understand why she's addicted to friendship. Its first few chapters are its strongest, as Elizabeth Day recounts various friendships in her life (the childhood friend, the college friend, the frienemy, the date who turned into a friend).

Her third, Paradise City was named one of the best novels of 2015 in the Observer and the Evening Standard, and was People magazine's Book of the Week.It is an honest account of different types of friendships we encounter in our lives, from ghosting to best friends and everything in between. At that point you suddenly go oh yeah, she’s another professional victim, and the text loses authority as you notice how foggy her world is, and then it just gets gloomy. It seems like a sad indictment of society that we even need to try and analyse friendships but the author sums it up herself….