fOut of friends can sometimes feel strangely embarrassing. Romantic relationships are intended to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach an adult, you expect your friendship to have reached a certain equilibrium. I have this image in my mind as a loving, dedicated friend, but sometimes I look into my true feelings towards a woman who is closest to me and shocked by her pettiness. It’s embarrassing to be an adult, but there can still be a fierce flash of light like anger and vy hope. When my friendship gets distant or nervous, I wonder why I still have a hard time doing this basic thing.
Bad friends represent a kind of love letter to a female friendship, but don’t check how difficult it is. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian and although this book is a deeply researched study of the relationships of women in the 20th century, the reason for writing it is very personal. In the prologue, she fell with her best friend Sophia in her early 30s, and she has since struggled with the feeling that she can’t have close friendships. In one aisle, she explains that she is hiding a sparkly “BFF” (Eternal Best Friends) T-shirt from her 5-year-old daughter. But the idea of supporting this book is that we expect too many women’s friendships, which makes all women feel inadequate.
We support friendship infinitely, are rewarding and sacred, and flattering the complexity. Part of this issue, Watt Smith argues, is that, while history is largely written by men, means spending time having close female friends, the reality is that it receives little academic attention. In this book, she trolls through the archives to track the history of an incomplete and ordinary friend. Bad Friends is Watt Smith’s attempt to replace the ideals of female friendship with a “new paradigm” that we may actually be able to live.
Watt Smith’s relationship with Sofia partially fell apart due to her own jealousy. Sofia was married and planning a baby, and Watt Smith felt left. In a chapter called Traitor, she mined books, magazines, and psychoanalytic case notes from the 1970s and 1980s, gathering testimonies from women who were competitive and hurt when their friends were promoted or started a family. In a fascinating passage, Watt Smith cites 17th-century poet Katherine Phillips. “We may generally conclude that a friend’s marriage is a funeral of friendship,” she complained in a letter from 1662.
By tracing history due to her own difficult feelings for Sofia, Watt Smith isn’t trying to justify herself or suggests that readers should simply extravagant those negative feelings, but she should not try to suppress them either. By reading about other women who resented our friends, we can acknowledge our impulses and pass them.
Watt Smith writes about how difficult female friendship can be without reducing its preciousness. She tells the story of actress Cookie Mueller. Cookie Muller is nursed to death by her friend and former partner Sharon Neist to her death from an AIDS-related illness and discusses other women who use it as a jump-off point to intervene to help friends who are disappointed in the healthcare system. In another chapter, she reveals the lost history of a network of hundreds of women who lived jointly around Europe between 1200 and 1500 years, collecting wealth and political influences entirely without men. Watt Smith does not edit the challenging parts of these relationships. She writes about the resentment that caregivers felt towards their friends and the internal conflict that took place in the commune, and her honesty makes the book very valuable. Only by embracing the limits of female friendship can we maximize its potential.
Towards the end of the book, Watt Smith reconnects with Sofia, but there is no grand reconciliation. They have dinner at a chain restaurant, which is sturdy and a bit nasty. They cannot completely recapture what they have lost. She writes that from that night she and Sofia slowly returned to each other, but that is different – not intimate, they must accept each. This feels like a completely incomplete way to complete this book.
If we stop hoping that female friendship is frictionless, women like me want to abandon their close relationships whenever they are jealous or hurt. In this book, Watt Smith offers a blueprint for how to maintain flawed and sometimes painful friendships, but they make more sense because they are authentic.
