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ABRAMS BOOKS - Leaver Kate Leaver

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91 pages

English

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Our best friends, Twitter followers, gal-pals, bromances, Facebook friends, and long distance buddies define us in ways we rarely openly acknowledge. But as a society, we are simultaneously terrified of being alone and already desperately lonely. We move through life in packs and friendship circles and yet, in the most interconnected age, we are stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of our time. It's killing us, making us miserable and causing a public health crisis. Increasingly, we don't just die alone; we die because we are alone. What if meaningful friendships are the solution?Journalist Kate Leaver believes that friendship is the essential cure for the modern malaise of solitude, ill health, and anxiety and that, if we only treated camaraderie as a social priority, it could affect everything from our physical health and emotional well being. Her much-anticipated manifesto, The Friendship Cure, looks at what friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it, and what we can do to get the most from it. Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others are only temporary? How do you "break up? with a toxic friend? How do you make friends as an adult? Can men and women really be platonic? What are the curative qualities of friendship, and how we can deploy friendship to actually live longer, better lives?From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her "squad? to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship. For readers of Susan Cain's Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating blend of accessible "smart thinking,? investigative journalism, pop culture, and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.

Informations

Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	23 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781468316605
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0720€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

the friendship cure
reconnecting in the modern world
O ur best friends, Twitter followers, girl squads, bromances, childhood friends, and office colleagues each define us in ways we rarely openly acknowledge. But in a culture that encourages near-constant sociability but leaves little room for reflection, it can be hard to articulate what each of these relationships mean to us. Perhaps this is why, even in our most interconnected age, we are stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of our time.
Journalist Kate Leaver believes that friendship is the essential cure for this modern malaise, and that, if treated as a priority, it could dispel the acute feelings of isolation in our culture and impact our physical health and emotional well being. In this compelling, fresh, and thought-provoking exploration of our most essential relationships, Leaver gets to the root of the meaning of friendship, discussing what it requires-from effortful conversations and investment of time and emotion to carefree camaraderie-and how it enriches our lives and determines our sense of belonging and self.
From behavioral scientists to her besties, Leaver draws upon the extraordinary findings of academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, as well as the more intimate experiences of those in her own friend circle and stories gathered from strangers online to investigate what friendship is, how it feels, why we need it, what we can do to get the most from it-and how we might change the world if we value it properly. In The Friendship Cure, Leaver seeks to answer questions including: Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while others are only temporary? How do you break up with a toxic friend? Can men and women really be platonic? And how do you make friends as an adult? How can friendships help us live longer, better lives?
For readers of Susan Cain s Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert s Big Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating blend of accessible smart thinking, investigative journalism, pop culture, and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2018 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
NEW YORK
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special orders, please contact sales@overlookny.com , or write us at the above address.
2018 Kate Leaver
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
EISBN: 978-1-4683-1660-5
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
What is friendship?
Chapter 2
We are social animals
Chapter 3
Squad goals and girlfriends
Chapter 4
Bromance and guy love
Chapter 5
Can men and women ever be just mates?
Chapter 6
Work wives and 9-5 husbands
Chapter 7
Friend requests and liking people online
Chapter 8
Friendship break-ups
Chapter 9
The loneliness epidemic
Chapter 10
Misery needs company
Chapter 11
Friends with health benefits
Chapter 12
Happily ever after
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
What is friendship?
IT S THE FIRST WEEK of university. Cambridge, 1998. That tender, exhilarating week, when you feel like you have to choose your friends for life, right there, on the spot. Gillian is 19 years old; Liz is 18. They meet and they like one another, but they toy with the idea of befriending other people.
Days into university life, Gillian and Liz discover they re both reading English. They re sat next to one another in a class about playwrights and on this particular day they re studying Harold Pinter. The teacher calls for two women to read one of Pinter s scenes out loud. It s called The Black and White, from A Night Out . It s from a collection of tableaus by Pinter; a series of little life stories. This one is about two old ladies dunking bread in soup and watching the world go by. It s one of those flawless sketches - mundane in perfect measure, like it s been written straight from life.
Gillian and Liz are nominated to read the scene. They giggle, as teenagers do, even that close to 20. The teacher (Peter? Ed? They only remember that they were already on a first name basis) reads the stage directions aloud.

THE FIRST OLD WOMAN is sitting at a milk bar table. Small.
A SECOND OLD WOMAN approaches. Tall. She is carrying two bowls of soup, which are covered by two plates, on each of which is a slice of bread. She puts the bowls down on the table carefully.
Gillian is THE FIRST OLD WOMAN, Liz is A SECOND OLD WOMAN. Or was it the other way around? Whatever; they take an old woman each and they read the scene, which is a quaint little meditation on hot soup, social interaction, bus timetables and the dangers of talking to strangers as an older woman. They taunt each other about flirting with strange men, imply they used to be troublemakers and peer out the window to check when the bus is coming. It is a rather perfect little glimpse into friendship between old ladies.
During that scene, with the ease of youth, Gillian and Liz become best friends.
That was nearly two decades ago, that class. Gillian and Liz are now in their late thirties and they re still best friends. In fact, in homage to the Pinter play that cemented their friendship, they have a standing date for the year 2040. It s a Facebook event with only two guests: Gillian and Liz. In roughly two decades, they ll go back to Cambridge, find a diner within walking distance of a bus stop, and order tomato soup with complimentary bread. They ll natter on at one another about public transport, the audacity of the young, men in uniform and the passage of time. Maybe they ll recite the Pinter scene, maybe by then they ll have their own grievances with hospitality and strangers. Either way, they ll be there, a lifetime into a friendship that started one day in 1998. They ll have a language only they understand and that curmudgeonly way of speaking that you have to earn with old age. Their kids will have had kids, their husbands might still be around, their families will keep them alive. But after all those years, they ll be the ultimate ambassadors for lifelong friendship: THE FIRST OLD WOMAN and A SECOND OLD WOMAN. And oh, what a glorious achievement that will be.
When I try to predict my own future, there s one thing I know to be true: my friends will be there for it. When I daydream about my life to come, the elements of existence dance uncertainly. Marriage? Sure. A long and fascinating career? Yes, please. Kids? Probably. But friendship is my non-negotiable, my definite, my always. I can see it now: five or six of us playing lawn bowls in the sunshine, drinking wine, squabbling about decades of shared history. There ll be a few new hips and knees between us, several dentures, a couple of hearing aids. We ll have some kind of mutual vice that our doctors and children wish we didn t have - alcohol with our blood pressure medication, a regular stash of hash cookies, an old-timer gambling ring, some late-in-life mischief we can cackle over. We ll have our own shared language; maybe it s bus timetables, maybe it s the creeping heat of summer, maybe it s the proper rules of Balderdash. In my ultimate fantasy of old age, we live together - or at least, on the same street. We re within shuffling distance from one another, possibly with walkie-talkies for ease of communication. Whatever happens between now and then, we choose to close our adulthood the way we started it: next to one another.
To me, that s the ultimate in friendship. It s the promise of soup and cantankerous behaviour decades from now. It s a tacit pact to stay in each other s lives by choice, not because biology compels it. That s what friends literally are, after all, they re the family we choose. Or, perhaps it s better to say that staying friends until the end is the gold standard in friendship. It s the dream. There are so many complex, lovely, toxic, frantic, fleeting manifestations of friendship for all of us. It s what defines us at every turn: the people we choose to keep and the people we leave behind. Every time we interact with someone new, we work out whether we want them in our lives and if so, in what capacity. Each new acquaintance has the potential to be elucidating, destructive, fabulous, painful and sublime. How we manage our relationships with other human beings is what makes us who we are.
There are the legacy friends we ve had since preschool or primary school, the ones we can t quite let go of because the longer we are friends, the more accumulative history we have in common. There are the family friends we just kind of adopted from our parents, like pseudo cousins who grew up around us. The high-school friends we originally chose out of necessity because adolescence is a game of survival and you grab whoever s closest to you on the first day. The university friends we actually consciously select using our almost fully developed frontal lobe. The work friends we spend more time with than just about anyone else in our lives. The accidental friends we collect along the way and keep until it s too late to discard them. The casual friends we get on with at parties but don t bother to pursue beyond that. The Facebook friends we make partly out of social obligation, partly because on some days, somewhere in our souls, we still count the number of social media connections as a measure of who we are. The Twitter friends we banter with when we should be doing work. The Instagram friends with whom we only ever really exchange likes . And ever