Tiffany Watt Smith

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Bad Friend

Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven - women who choose to live together in old age - of the present day. These 'bad' friends broke the rules about femininity they didn't write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful. In this new history of women's friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection. She takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to My Brilliant Friend, and untangles the larger forces acting on our intimate relationships in order to free us from their hold. Weaving together history, interviews and memoir, Bad Friend offers what's long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.

Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven - women who choose to live together in old age - of the present day. These 'bad' friends broke the rules about femininity they didn't write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful. In this new history of women's friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection. She takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to My Brilliant Friend, and untangles the larger forces acting on our intimate relationships in order to free us from their hold. Weaving together history, interviews and memoir, Bad Friend offers what's long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.