I’ve been listening to Call Your Girlfriend for years now and was so thrilled forAminatou and Ann’s book Big Friendship. This book did not disappoint. Whether you’ve been a fan of the podcast for years or you’ve never heard of it (fix that) I think so many people will find value in this book. 

“We give relationships meaning by the amount of attention and work we put into them. Just as we can choose to leave our friendships unattended and hope they stay warm, we can also choose to elevate our most important friendships to a status equal to marriage, family, and career. We can choose to keep them active, to keep investing in them”

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who puts her friends first. I never wanted to be the person who got in a relationship and forgot about all of their friends. I never wanted to lose a friendship. And I never wanted any of my friendships to change. But things do change, and you do have to decide how each friendship is going to navigate that change. And I’m so grateful for an entire book that explores these ideas through Ann and Aminatou’s friendship.

Ann and Amintaou dive into the beginnings of their friendship, the times when they each had to stretch for each other for various reasons, as well as when their friendship that they thought was too big to fail, began to fail. They discuss interracial friendships, long distance friendships and the operating principles of their friendship like Shine Theory and the Friendweb.  They define Big Friendship as “a bond of great strength, force, and significance that transcends life phases, geography, and emotional shifts. It is large in dimension, affecting most aspects of each persons life. It is full of meaning and resonance. A Big Friendship is reciprocal, with both parties feeling worthy of each other and willing to give themselves in generous ways. A Big Friendship is active. Hearty. And almost always, a Big Friendship is mature. it’s advanced age commands respect and predicts its ability to last far into the future”

One of my favorite parts about this book is honestly just the fact that it exists. An entire book putting into words why we can and should take friendships seriously. Why the narrative that if friendships are easy they are good and if they are ever hard they are bad. This book reminded me of Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” in the way that it emphasizes what Odell calls an ethics of care and maintenance. There can and should be joy and value in maintaining things, not just in producing new things. She speaks mostly in terms of how we think of our public spaces and our time, but this book shows that it’s also true of friendships, and in Big Friendships in particular. 

~Right now on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast they’re doing a Summer of Friendship series where they dive into a lot of the aspects of their book. Some of the other episodes I’ve loved are this 2 part episode that’s one of the most nuanced discussions of Joe Biden I’ve heard (obviously VOTE FOR BIDEN), their honest discussions about money, and their obsession with scams. They discuss “the intricacies of pop culture and the latest in politics” and they’re amazing. Give em a listen!

~If you aren’t yet familiar with Odell’s book you can read this transcript of a Keynote she gave at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis. An adapted version appears in her book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.