Falling out with a friend can feel oddly shameful. Romantic relationships are meant to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach adulthood, you expect your friendships to have reached some kind of equilibrium. I have this image in my head of myself as an affectionate, devoted friend – but sometimes I examine my true feelings towards the women who are closest to me and feel shocked by my own pettiness. It is embarrassing to be a grownup but still capable of such intense flashes of rage, and envy. When my friendships become distant or strained, I wonder why I still struggle to do this basic thing.
Bad Friend represents a kind of love letter to female friendship, but doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian, and this book is a deeply researched study of 20th-century women’s relationships, but the reason for writing it is intensely personal. In the prologue, she says that she fell out with her best friend, Sofia, in her early 30s, and has been battling with the feeling that she is incapable of close friendship ever since. In one passage, she describes hiding a sparkly “BFF” (best friends forever) T-shirt from her five-year-old daughter, because she felt so conflicted about having no BFF of her own. But the idea that underpins this book is that we expect too much of female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate.
We mythologise friendship as endlessly supportive and rewarding, flattening its complexity. Part of the problem, Watt Smith argues, is that history has been mostly written by men, so the reality of what it has meant to have close female friends through time has received very little academic attention. In this book, she trawls through the archives to trace the history of imperfect, ordinary friends – who hurt and disappoint each other, but keep striving for connection regardless. Bad Friend is Watt Smith’s attempt to replace the ideal of female friendship with a “new paradigm” that we might actually be able to live up to.
Watt Smith’s relationship with Sofia disintegrated partly because of her own jealousy. Sofia was getting married and planning a baby, and Watt Smith felt left behind. In a chapter called Traitor, she mines books, magazines and psychoanalytic case notes from the 1970s and 80s, collecting testimonies from women who felt competitive and hurt when their friends got promoted, or started families. In one fascinating passage, Watt Smith quotes the 17th-century poet Katherine Phillips, who felt so betrayed by her best friend’s marriage that she never forgave her. “We may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be a Funeral of aFriendship,” she complained in a letter from 1662.
By tracing a history for her own difficult feelings towards Sofia, Watt Smith isn’t trying to justify herself, or suggest that her reader should simply luxuriate in those negative emotions – but she argues that we shouldn’t try to repress them, either. By reading about other women who have resented their friends, we can begin to acknowledge those impulses in ourselves, and move past them.
Watt Smith writes about how hard female friendship can be without ever diminishing its preciousness. She tells the story of actress Cookie Mueller, who was nursed up until her death from Aids-related illness by her friend and ex-partner Sharon Niesp, using it as a jumping-off point to discuss other women who step in to support friends who are let down by the medical system. In another chapter, she uncovers a lost history of networks of hundreds of women who lived communally around Europe between 1200-1500, amassing wealth and political influence, entirely without men. Watt Smith doesn’t edit out the challenging parts of these relationships. She writes about the resentments carers felt towards their friends, and the infighting that took place in the communes – but that honesty is precisely what makes this book feel so valuable. Only by accepting the limitations of female friendship can we appreciate its full 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 and it is stilted and a little awkward. They can’t quite recapture what they have lost. She writes that since that night, she and Sofia have slowly found their way back to each other, but it’s different – less intimate – and each has to accept the other has changed. This feels like a perfectly imperfect way to finish this book, which is about accepting relationships as they actually are, rather than as you would like them to be.
If we stop expecting female friendship to be frictionless, women like me will stop wanting to abandon a close relationship every time they feel jealous or hurt. With this book, Watt Smith provides us with a blueprint for how to sustain friendships that are flawed, and sometimes painful – but more meaningful because they are real.
Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships by Tiffany Watt Smith is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy fromguardianbookshop.com