Full of Moore’s hilarious personal anecdotes, advice on how to identify your attachment style, and real tools to create better communication and boundaries, this book is your personal guide on how to heal from your past friendships, improve your current ones, and finally have the friendships we know we deserve.

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. You deserve to have friendships where there’s an equal give and take. Friends who understand you, and you have fun, true, silly little kid fun (even if, and especially if, you never got to truly have fun as a kid, because you were already basically an adult). Friends who allow and encourage you to have healthy boundaries, as they work to establish their own. I love the idea of having a small group of friends that you get together with and be really involved with. I love the idea of weekly get togethers. I loved the biblical preaching of man is not made to be alone and how it goes into details about that. I love the sense of community. I love sharing the really ugly and the good and getting real about life. So yes, there is a lot of good to this book.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. It’s not that there was anything wrong with my family or my school or the few friends I had, or my neighborhood—not at all. We all had our ups and downs, but we moved on and through it and had good times and bad. But I just felt a deep sense that the people around me were aliens. Or I was. Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.” ~Unknown I love Lane Moore’s work, which is always funny, vulnerable, and wise, and I appreciate how seriously she treats the project of building a rewarding, secure adulthood around relationships other than the romantic ones we’ve historically been told are central.” —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of All The Single Ladies How To Be Alone: If You Want To And Even If You Don’t

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. As I got older, though, that didn’t turn out to be the case. It didn’t stop me from trying, though: I needed all these types of friends, because society told me I did, so I clung to the people I met who even remotely fit these descriptions like hard-won Girl Scout badges, no matter how unhealthy the dynamic was, as proof I could do it. I could be just like everyone else in this one way, since I couldn’t be like everyone else who had perfect families. (Please see my first book: How to Be Alone.) That was very much out of my hands. But friendships? I could do that. Contort myself to make a bunch of people like me and never leave? Can’t wait! There’s no way you could go wrong when that is your very upsetting view of friendship! Part memoir, part self-help, You Will Find Your People uncovers the complex, frightening, and often vulnerable process of building real, healthy friendships and finally creating your chosen family. Moore takes readers on a journey that examines and challenges the ideas of friendship we’ve seen in pop culture, answers every question you’ve ever had about friend breakups, and teaches us how to fearlessly ask for what we want in friendships once and for all. One woman’s wry, wise, sometimes funny and often melancholy reminder that friends can be demanding and complicating, love is imperfect and obligating, and you can’t count on a hard-charging cavalry of people who were just right for you to come riding over the hill and sweep you away.”— NPR’s Weekend Edition By the time I got home and realized this was a very Christian themed book, I decided to give it a chance anyway. I liked the premise of building community after all. There were some good general things about cultivating friendship such as accountability, putting in the time m, conflict resolution etc. The layout of the book made it easy to read.It can be easy to think your current friends aren’t good enough for you or not giving you the things you want in the relationship and you should find new people, and sometimes that’s true. But before you go off thinking it’s not you, it’s them (which it might be!), try reaching out, and communicating, and putting some more effort in and see if that helps things.