Bad Friend: Tiffany Watt Smith explores why women abandon friendships

Book cover of Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith — Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith

(Image credit: Faber & Faber)

For much of human history, said Erica Wagner in the FT, friendship has been regarded as a male preserve. "Perfect friendship," Aristotle wrote, "is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue." For the 17th century poet Margaret Cavendish, women's brains were "simply too weak" to support the "complex bonds" of friendship. In this "thought-provoking, open-hearted" cultural history, Tiffany Watt Smith explores how this situation has changed.

Nowadays, while men are castigated for their lack of emotional articulacy, female friendship is a "kind of cultural ideal". And by the late 20th century, being likeable and popular had become part of the conventional feminine paradigm, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph. With this came various tropes: the "girl crush", the "popular" girl (a staple of 1990s romcoms), and the "bad friend", who "eschews sisterhood to pursue her individual ambition". All this, Watt Smith suggests, has created unrealistic expectations – meaning female friendship is "more fraught than ever".

Watt Smith fleshes out her "deeply researched" account with descriptions of how she fell out with her best friend Sofia, said Kitty Drake in The Guardian. The cause, she admits, was largely her own jealousy at feeling "left behind" when Sofia started a family. But she also blames the societal expectation that female friendship should be "frictionless": this, she says, often drives women to abandon a friendship when "they feel jealous or hurt".