Unlock the publisher's digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
What do we mean when we call someone a “friend”? As Tiffany Watt Smith notes Bad friendEnglish is strangely impoverished when it comes to defining the different borders and obligations of non -romantic and non -family relationships.
In RussianShe writes, Medication / Podruga (m / f) describes someone to whom you will be eternally faithful; Friend / promise ' (M / f) is used for someone you meet several times a year because you like the business of the other. Znakomiy / Znakomaya Have someone you met a few times-you love him, but I don't know much about them.
Perhaps for the latter, we could say “knowledge” in English; But there is little room for development in this word. To use “friend” – as really, we owe in each of these contexts – invites confusion.
It is this confusion that Watt Smith wishes to lead and elucidate in his reflection and his open heart book. He focuses on female friendships and how they were represented and perceived throughout the last century, but his observations are useful for both sexes.
Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions And Schadenfreude: the joy of the misfortune of anotherAnd reader in cultural history at Queen Mary University in London. In Bad friendIt combines a degree of memory with history: His own experiences offer examples that the reader will recognize with relief and dismay. By implementing against a historical framework, it shows to what extent our interactions are shaped by the expectations of society.
It is surprising to discover that the idea of female friendship is relatively new. The French trialist Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) believed that women were incapable of “this holy bond of friendship, and their souls do not seem firm enough to resist the clasp of a node so durable and so closely drawn”.
A century later, the great scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish accepted: the brains of women were simply too weak to support such complex links. It was not until 20th century – and societal upheavals strong by two world wars – that female friendship has been found as a kind of cultural ideal. Watt Smith quotes the historian Mark Peel, who called the 20th century “the age of female friendship, or perhaps the age when friendship has become a woman”.
By trying to go to the heart of what makes female friendship distinctive, the author begins with an example of his own life: her intense link with Sofia, with whom she shared an apartment in her twenties. Watt Smith calls him “my great romance, my most proud realization”. When she thinks of Sofia now: “I see her in the Italian cafe, she loved the most, the chocolate on her coffee becoming dark and sticky as she leans and tells me her secrets. I drink it. “
If you had to read these quotes without context, could you not assume that it was a sexual and romantic relationship? The intensity of female friendship can make this delimitation elusive. What the author describes is almost an bewitchment, the one who sounded faithful when I remembered some of my first friendships, girls who were my age but who seemed older, whose sophistication I admired. Suzie, who taught me drinking coffee, made me wave my legs, eat sushi. Coffee and sushi were disgusting and wax was painful, but I persisted, and I am here decades later with the three practices anchored in my life, although this friendship imploded a long time ago.
It took me years to overcome the pain of losing this friendship – Watt Smith's trajectory with Sofia echoes mine. Such suffering can be called “sorrow deprived of their rights”, she writes, because friendship is not maintained in high esteem that our other relationships.
This relative contempt means that the recordings of female friendship are rare; But Watt Smith is diligent in his research. She discovered a “friendship” of the beginning of the 20th century between a white prison reformer and a black detainee from a New York women prison; But the detainee, Minerva Jones, did not know that her “friend” was on the cover in the prison, and not he herself an inmate. Friendship or exploitation?
Watt Smith explores different levels of transactionality. She also seeks to co-lodge communities, where friends live together in a way that we expect more often families. She believes that she will meet a type of superhuman in these contexts, women who were “so advanced that they instinctively knew how to manage conflicts”.
But of course, no one is superwoman; What she finds is a careful intentionality. She understands that friendship “requires a will. Willingness to try to find a solution, the desire to try again, the will to seek the connection, the will again and again. ”
Bad friend is a striking title; I hope it helps this book fly shelves – but I'm not sure it is precise. Admittedly, Watt Smith examines his own friendships and often finds himself missing: but at a certain level, all relationships will have an integrated fracture point. His book does not provide a recipe to preserve or improve our friendships: in 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote that relations between women were “a large room where no one has been”. Watt Smith cannot completely light up the shadows in this room: but it holds a bright light on the subject, and it is a valid start.
Bad friend: a century of revolutionary friendships by Tiffany Watt Smith Faber 18.99 £ / Céladon books $ 29.99, 336 pages
Join our online books online on Facebook in Ft Books Coffee And follow the FT weekend on Instagram And X
