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The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith review – refreshingly frank portraits of female friendship
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 a Friendship,' 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 from
Telegraph
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Women, here's why you'll always have ‘bad friends'
My first friendship, when I was 12, was so formative that the minutiae of its creation and implosion are more vivid to me than that, two decades later, of an 11-year romantic relationship. I still have, somewhere in a box, a black ring-binder chronicling my and my friend's daily interactions, from furtive classroom notes to postcards and 'tops secret' six-page letters. I can still perfectly visualise her turquoise ink and curly handwriting. There were also endless lists: why she was my best friend, why I was her best friend, and eventually, after five years, why she was a bad friend. 'The fear of the bad friend is perennial,' writes historian Tiffany Watt Smith in Bad Friend, which adeptly traces the evolution of female friendship across the past century. Interspersed with personal ruminations on the times she resented such a figure – or became one herself – she asks why and how friendship, as we understand it today, became intrinsic to our notions of what women are and how they behave. For by the 20th century, she writes, 'being likeable and popular, and having close friends', had become 'an identifying marker of an ideal and conventional femininity'. It's why, during the deluge of 1990s rom-coms, the 'popular' girl, so often flanked by two female sidekicks, is usually the subject of universal lust. And those films were never really about the boy: from Princess Diaries to Mean Girls, female friendship drives the plot. Often, when I've spoken to other young women about first love and heartbreak, they talk not of romantic partners but, like me, about an early female friendship. This was their induction into the exquisitely painful sequence of love, admiration and obsession followed by paranoia, jealousy and betrayal. Yet for centuries, Watt Smith writes, friendship was only esteemed when it was between men. 'Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue,' wrote Aristotle. Montaigne deemed women 'incapable of this 'holy bond'', their souls not 'firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.' By the 17th century, however, upper-class women were being taught to read and write, and they were soon sending each other devoted letters. Watt Smith offers some breathless correspondence from Mary Wollstonecraft to the illustrator Fanny Blood, in which the former describes the latter as the one 'whom I love better than all the world… to live with this friend is the height of my ambition'. After Blood's death, Wollstonecraft wore for the rest of her life a bejewelled mourning ring containing her friend's hair. With the rise of boarding schools for girls, female friendship became grounded in a new kind of physical intimacy, and developed an erotic undercurrent. Dinah Craik wrote in her 1858 guidebook A Woman's Thoughts About Women that these bonds were as 'delicious and almost as passionate as first love'. Boarding-school novels about the relationships of girlhood were serialised in the weekly papers. By 1913, magazines were warning mothers of the 'dangers' of girl crushes. 'The girl with the crush,' writes Watt Smith, 'became the century's first Bad Friend.' These crushes were inevitably reviled as proof of the feminine capacity for hysteria and weakness. Take, for instance, Mary-Lou, the 'poor, timid' girl from Enid Blyton 's Malory Towers books: she worships an older classmate by performing constant acts of service, and even her friends mock her as a 'little ninny'. Was this a reflection of societal homophobia, wonders Watt Smith, or something more complicated? She gestures to Blyton's own whirlwind friendship with a nurse called Dorothy, employed by the writer to help with childcare following the breakdown of Blyton's marriage to Hugh Pollock. Pollock's second wife Ida alleged that something 'unsavoury' had been at play, claiming that Pollock had found the two women 'locked in a bathroom together' on several occasions. (The friendship ended when Blyton remarried. Dorothy would not attend the ceremony, Watt Smith explains, 'disapproving of its haste'.) Female friendship became increasingly political. 'With each new freedom won by women,' Watt Smith explains, 'fears about their friendships gather momentum.' A case in point: the women's liberation movement, which itself led to a friction between women that produces some of Bad Friend's most engaging analysis. The movement may have created a powerful female solidarity, yet its results promoted an individualism that splintered female communities, heightening comparisons and rivalries. For the ultimate 'bad friend', or so Watt Smith hypothesises, is the woman who eschews sisterhood to pursue her individual ambition. Take Dorothy Arzner, the only woman directing feature-length studio films in Hollywood during the 1930s. It would fit so neatly for her to have risen through the ranks at Paramount thanks to, as Watt Smith puts it, 'female workers sticking together to stick it to the patriarchy'. Yet Arzner dismissed this narrative. 'No one gave me trouble because I was a woman,' she said later. 'Men were more helpful than women.' Today, Arzner might end up described as a 'pick me girl': internet slang for a woman who seeks validation from men by undermining other women, not least in describing herself, implicitly or explicitly, as 'not like other girls'. In fact, now that therapy-speak dominates online spaces, we no longer refer to 'bad' friends so much as 'toxic' friends – people who're corrosive to our mental health and must be swiftly cut from our lives. This focus on the self and how others make us feel, combined with the rise in online comparison culture and the atomising effects of 'alternate' lifestyles – being single and/or childless, as women increasingly are – has made female friendship more fraught than ever. In the media and online, for instance, it seems like barely a week goes by without another viral first-person account from a 'wronged' friend. 'Why Can't Our Friendship Survive Your Baby', published by New York Magazine in 2023 was a standout. I read more agony-aunt columns about toxic friends than about toxic relationships. Even Watt Smith's book seems, at its core, bent less on tracing 20th-century women's history than on trying, sometimes to the point of solipsism, to absolve her own perceived failings as a friend. The book would have been stronger without such personal interludes, which are too vague and repetitive to be compelling. These could have been replaced with longer discussions of witch-trials, friendships across class boundaries, and what social media has meant for it all. In the meantime, it seems to this young woman as though our standards for friendship are getting higher and higher, even as we grapple with a loneliness epidemic: 16- to 29-year-olds are twice as likely to be chronically lonely than those who are over 70. Perhaps, as Watt Smith concludes, we should stop proclaiming others to be 'amazing' friends or 'terrible' friends, and content ourselves to be, and to have, friends who are simply good enough.
