The title is available in accessible formats for community members who do not use standard print. If you have a NYPL library card-or live in New York state and want to apply for one now-you can borrow Big Friendship for free with our e-reader app SimplyE, available for iOS and Android devices. Every Friday, she sends a popular email newsletter.

She is a contributor editor to The Gentlewoman. Aminatou lives in Brooklyn.Īnn Friedman is a journalist, essayist, and media entrepreneur. She is a frequent public speaker whose talks and interviews lead to candid conversations about ambition, money, and power. LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.Īminatou Sow is a writer, interviewer, and cultural commentator. Through interviews with friends and experts, Big Friendship reveals that we all must make the decision to invest in one another again and again.įriedman and Sow discuss how bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved and call on us to choose, value, and fight for our friendships in all of their complexity. In their book, Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, chronicle the first decade of their messy and life-affirming relationship: from moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration to profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. Keep your friends close-but it's not that simple, right? A close friendship can be one of the most influential and important relationships in our lives, but keeping it together for the long haul is no small task.

The hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend explain why you need to fight for them. I think that's the exercise most people are engaged in when they're writing a memoir.Making friends isn't easy, particularly now. It's not true that everything that's in this book is also everything that's true about our lives, and nothing else is happening. All of the stories in the book are very carefully selected anecdotes that illustrate the larger points that we're making.

That stuff is far away, and it's not a source of pain anymore, which I think both of us have always been really conscious of only sharing things publicly that have been resolved privately. The spoiler really is we're still friends, we're still very much big friends. Part of writing the book in one voice is that there was the absolute safety of arriving at this conclusion together. The only reason that we can share it publicly at all is that we have worked through it individually, and we have worked through it together in therapy, and, again, we have worked through it in writing the book. We really had to muddle through a lot of the stuff that was painful in our relationship.

Ann friedman big friendship