Good Friends
Bonds That Change Us and the World
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
FRIENDSHIP IS THE GREAT LOVE STORY WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.
Friendship is good for your health.
Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
Still, we are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life.
What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.
Through her inspiring and impassioned prose, Vulchi entirely reimagines our platonic ties, revealing that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of love and resistance.
Intimate and engaging, Good Friends offers a resounding cry that friendship is not only vital for our own individual well-being, but for humanity itself. It invites you to be inspired not just by what people do but how people love. It invites you to look at your friends differently and enter a dazzlingly fresh philosophy of human connection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vulchi (Tell Me Who You Are), cofounder of the racial literacy nonprofit CHOOSE, crafts a humane and vulnerable paean to friendship. While many see friendships as a part of life that fades in the face of more pressing concerns like careers and family, Vulchi believes friendship is at the root of "what it means to be human." In her attempt to create "a new vocabulary" of friendship, Vulchi explicates, warts and all, her lifelong association with Winona Gao, a collaborator, occasional roommate, and "platonic life partner." The author also draws on ideas about friendship from Khalil Gibran, Virginia Woolf, and Aristotle, whose notion of a "friendship of virtue"—which he called "the highest form of love"—underpins the book. Elsewhere, Vulchi's cataloging of famous friendships provides some marvelous images, like Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz waiting in line for a movie, Emerson and Thoreau strolling together around Walden Pond, or Madonna flaunting her closeness to actor Sandra Bernhard at a concert that activist June Jordan also happened to be attending with her own friends. Jordan, in particular, emerges as the book's intellectual center: an outspoken feminist icon who maintained friendships with Angela Davis and Adrienne Rich (the latter relationship, at times, full of conflict), and whose life, in Vulchi's telling, serves as an important rebuke to the American myth of self-reliance. It's an incisive, elegant take on what it means to be a friend.
