The Friendship Cure
Reconnecting in the Modern World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian-British journalist Leaver sings the praises of friendship in this combination encomium, memoir, and pop psychology book. Though the title primes the reader to expect strategies for combating isolation, few are offered; this is actually a lengthy yet shallow exploration of what friendship looks and feels like in 2018. After a lighthearted tour through types, venues, and experiences of friendships (between men, between women, between men and women, online, at work, when depressed, when they're ending) which may alienate some readers with its uncritical embrace of evolutionary psychology, or the assumption that the reader is straight and cisgender come two chapters about the prevalence of loneliness and the health benefits of friendship, and a single page of vague prescriptions ("we need an aggressive, worldwide campaign of greater kindness and a dramatic revamp of our values as a human race"). A straightforward memoir whose narrator experiences change between the first and last pages might have had more emotional weight; more idiosyncratic, less general insights might have had more value to the reader interested in friendship. But this combination of observations, anecdotes, and quotes from experts that circle the same point that friendship is important feels repetitive, static, and without anything truly new.