Acabei por me relacionar muito com algumas das lutas travadas pela autora neste campo da sua vida, e consegui tirar alguns ensinamentos destas páginas. We still have happy memories, we’re grateful for those friendships, they were meant to be at the time. They share activities, such as sports, where their attention is focused on the same goals but not on one another. My friendships too have evolved, they’ve been stretched and tested, and in most cases, they’ve survived.

As such, everything is couched in the author's own experience and most topics are presented as the author trying to sort out a problem in her life. I’ve thought lots while reading this about my friends, and about how I act as a friend, and came out of this reading experience feeling I better understood what friendship means in my life, how to be a better friend, and with more conscious gratitude for my friends than I have had in some time.Elizabeth Day is the author of five novels and three works of non-fiction, including her Sunday Times bestselling novel Magpie , and hit memoir How to Fail . In summary, you’ll end up wanting to be Elizabeth’s friend, but also being okay with the fact that that’s not going to happen. Unfortunately, for me, the book is most interesting where it is least like a confessional and most like a scientific exploration of friendship. Relationships/friendships are so complex and it is reassuring to read something, in an easy way, that means your experiences aren’t that unusual after all!

Dealing with narcissistic lovers or recalcitrant teenagers has been deemed proper subject matter for academic psychologists and therapists for decades; how to cope with the potential ending of a friendship has, by comparison, been seen as rather trivial, just one of those things in life that we are supposed to navigate without guidance. 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. 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.It seems like a sad indictment of society that we even need to try and analyse friendships but the author sums it up herself…. Those are the midweek get-togethers (neither of you would dream of giving up a Saturday night to each other) which are somehow never as nice as they should be and leave you feeling down, depleted and as if it is somehow all your fault. Sinto que está uma boa tradução, mas acho que teria apreciado mais a leitura no seu original, uma vez que a autora é britânica e é muito difícil fazer transparecer esse tipo de humor na nossa língua.

Which gets at the other big limitation of the book for me, the outright dismissal of male-to-male friendships.As a journalist, she has written extensively across many titles, including T he Observer, The Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Grazia and Elle . It’s true that in most cases, there is no dramatic ending or huge falling out, they’ve just naturally come to an end. It is an honest account of different types of friendships we encounter in our lives, from ghosting to best friends and everything in between. I loved how Day approach this concept, from her early years through to today, and how her friendships (and many of the readers - well certainly me! We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

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. It’s good to have this book in circulation but you feel the opportunity for a clear ‘mess to message’ manual is out there and will obscure this one. I bought this knowing Elizabeth Day from her podcasts—How to Fail and Best Friend Therapy, co-hosted with her best friend Emma Reed Turrell—and thought this would be a bright, breezy, insightful, witty and uplifting book that would leave me with a smile on my face, but probably wouldn’t register very highly on the Richter scale of Important Works of Psychology. In general I'm ok with saying you have more than one best friend but Day has made it quite clear she only has one and that she's super special.

Being good at friendship, which is not quite the same as being a good friend, is a core self-belief that many of us (often women) cling to as evidence that we are, in some important way, both lovable and likable. That I prefer cinema dates to ones in bars and that I don’t do hugs (it’s nothing personal, I just don’t). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The second half of Friendaholic descends into women's-magazine-style puff (some people say social media makes them feel lonely, while others find it a useful way to keep in touch!