Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

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A drop-off point at the Royal Festival Hall (30 metres) has been created for visitors who are unable to walk from alternative car parks. Our Access Scheme Elizabeth Day is a former journalist, now author and podcaster. She is also a self-confessed Friendaholic. In this book, she examines her friendship and her addiction. It is a reflection of her connection to her friends, a compilation of studies of relationships throughout history. (The studies mentioned include Nietzche and Aristotle). Intertwined within the book are the "Friendship Tapes," various interviews with other people about their feelings in friendships. With the crisis came a dawning realisation: her truest friends were not the ones she had been spending most time with. For level access to the Royal Festival Hall from the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road, please use the Southbank Centre Square Doors. The JCB Glass Lift is situated at this entrance and will take you to all floors. All floors are accessible from the main foyer on Level 2. If you need further assistance, our Visitor Assistants are here to help you.

Unfortunately, for me, the book is most interesting where it is least like a confessional and most like a scientific exploration of friendship. For example the discussion of Cicero's De Amicitia or Dunbar's friendship circles are fascinating. What's less fascinating to me is Day's hand wringing about what text message she should send a shitty friend who she doesn't really like.

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Please be aware that the delivery time frame may vary according to the area of delivery - the approximate delivery time is usually between 1-2 business days. I was most interested in the chapters dealing with Friendship and Fertility. Personally, I have also dealt with fertility issues and am childless. I felt I lost friends when they became parents. Other friends avoid all discussions of pregnancy or children around me. Assumable as they do not know what to say around me. So, in the book, I loved reading about another woman's experiences in a similar situation. Suddenly, I felt seen! I realised that I wasn't paranoid and that my fertility issues affected my friendships. As a society, there is a tendency to elevate romantic love. But what about friendships? Aren't they just as – if not more – important? So why is it hard to find the right words to express what these uniquely complex bonds mean to us? In Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, Elizabeth Day embarks on a journey to answer these questions. This position may be horribly wrong for some people but it was noted down in the 80's so I'm sure its simple summary has since been superseded but it highlights the fact that if Day had just done a little bit more research she may have been able to really shed some light on male-to-male friendships and by way of contrast female-to-female friendships, and then friendship in general. And also Day brings her lovely writing style of honesty and humour which meant I devoured this in just a few days!

My marriage started to disintegrate. Seeing babies being pushed along the street in buggies caused me a stab of psychic pain,’ Elizabeth Day. Photograph: Sophia Spring/The Observer Here she confesses to be a friendship addict - something I am ruthlessly not - but it was interesting to see how others go about their needs and desires in a friend relationship. As always, she is candid and concise in an exploration of language around friendships, what that platonic relationship brings to our lives and the end of friendship - whether it is our choice or not. Academic and scientific lines of reasoning are used in this book to provide a bit of starch to an otherwise completely subjective book. Given that science is used as seasoning it shouldn't be surprising that there is little rigor cast over the facts chosen to support or prompt Day's positions. Of particular note was the use of the 2019 Snapchat Friendship report. I'm all for corporate entities creating qualitative studies with their platforms, we can always do with more research, but I'm also incredibly sceptical of the results. Day unfortunately applies no critical analysis whatsoever. Here's the extract about the Snapchat Friendship Report. One way of taking a stand against the spread of this mechanical language would be to stop lining the caps of confessional beggars like Elizabeth Day. For, as Auden says, though such writers are contemptible, they’re “not so contemptible as the public who buys their books”.This is the argument made by the American historian Christopher Lasch. As a staunch critic of mass consumption, which he viewed as a threat to the integrity of the individual, Lasch was particularly attuned to the ways in which it discouraged “initiative and self-reliance” and promoted “dependence” and “passivity”. “Dependent” people, he wrote in The Minimal Self (1984), are easily converted into consumers of therapy, which is “designed to ease [their] ‘adjustment’ to the realities of industrial life”. Therapy-speak, then, is the language of the consumer, and consumers do not make for independent thinkers, let alone free ones.

I had a bit of a weird moment a couple of years ago that turned out to be quite significant because I've thought about it often since. I walking with my friend Sam around Burnley Gardens. We came across this plaque on a bench overlooking a quiet corner of the gardens - scientists have routinely overlooked the study of friendship because it has no reproductive value... But if friendship has no survival value, it certainly adds value to survival. We choose friendship - and this, in Aristotle's view, makes it a higher-level love because of the freedom of intention that lies behind it. Blue Badge holders and those with access requirements can be dropped off on the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road (the road between the Royal Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery).Meet Elizabeth Day, recovering “friendaholic”. While she was no queen bee at school, Day became an indiscriminate collector of pals in adulthood, reaching her 40s before questioning the urge. This unabashedly personal book charts her attempts to “course-correct” by analysing the meaning of friendship. She’s helped by five of her closest confidants, including journalist Sathnam Sanghera and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill, with first-person takes from the likes of a neurodivergent Iraqi woman and the sixtysomething chairman of a Norfolk “men’s shed”. It’s a generous, companionable guide to a part of life every bit as crucial – and as fraught – as romance or family. The Women Who Saved the English Countryside Day’s own experience provides the scaffolding for the book. A childhood in Northern Ireland, where she was an outsider, had a dearth of friends and suffered bullying, left her with an insatiable need to be liked. So, she began collecting friends. “For me, being bullied made me determined in later life to prove my worth,” she writes. “Becoming successful, having my name in print, being blessed with a wide circle of endless friends: these became inviolable markers of my sense of identity.”

For any reader yet to encounter Katherine Heiny, this sparky new story collection provides a joyous introduction. Its title encompasses her protagonists’ antics in pursuit of – or flight from – love. They’re a somewhat jaded bunch with awkward pasts they never seem able to break free of. Nor can they stop yearning. And so a driving examiner only partially succeeds in remaining realistic about her workplace crush; a receptionist wears a taffeta bridesmaid dress to the office; a New York journalist, stranded by snow in her loathed Michigan hometown, finds sozzled closure in an airport bar. The deadpan delivery, the bittersweet wisdom, the sublime farce – it’s all here. Items are left in our cloakrooms at the owner’s risk, and we cannot accept any responsibility for loss or damage, from any cause, to these items. We're cash-free The essential difference between male and female same-sex friendships, is that female friendships are "face to face" whereas male friendships are "side by side". These phrases capture the frequently replicated finding that female friends like to "just talk" and view this activity as central to their friendship. Females compared to males also describe their talk as more intimate and more self-disclosing. Male friends, on the other hand, prefer to do things together other than "just talking." They share activities, such as sports, where their attention is focused on the same goals but not on one another.Perceptive, compassionate and filled with relatable insights into all that is beautiful about friendship, with its most valuable point being that it should be about quality, rather than quantity.’THE DAILY MAIL - Her only other source on male-to-male friendships is her male friend who doesn't have any. Seen as he doesn't have any or think they're any good they must therefore not exist right? That's just stupid. This male friend of hers who is the chosen expert on male friendship despite not having any says he's the type of guy who hates a stag do. Hmmmmm. I wonder if we should maybe look around for someone who likes the quintessential western male-to-male bonding experience before we just openly dismiss male friendship as a fiction. I turn to psychologist and professor Paul Wright to sum up the main difference between male and female friendships. I’ve never read a book about friendships before. This one really digs deep, is bravely revealing and makes me reflect on my own friendship habits, issues, and culture.” - Bernardine Evaristo