Bad Friend

What is a friend? A celebrated cultural historian reckons with the wayswe understand this complex and vital connection. In this new history of women´s friendship, Watt Smith untangles the larger forces acting on our intimate relationships to free us from their hold. Calling upon friendships shared between the Ali Bedouins of Egypt to those of prisoners in New York, between school girls in Japan and those among Romantic radicals in London, Bad Friend weaves together history, interviews and memoir to offer a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for 21st century life. Timely, under-explored subject in non-fiction despite sociologists´ prediction that friendships will overtake biological family as the defining support structures of the twenty-first century, and their prominence in successful fiction and TV – from Fleabag to Conversations with Friends