Why You Should Do a BFF Book Club With Your Bestie

[image description: my hand holding a copy of the book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman.]

Over the summer I heard about a book coming out by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, which I’d been a sporadic listener of at best. What intrigued me about the book is that it’s about friendship––real BFF friendship, the kind of friendship that marks the other person as one of the most significant and meaningful relationships in your life.

The authors call that level of friendship Big Friendship, which is where the title of the book derives its name. The tagline further hits home: How We Keep Each Other Close. I’m fortunate to have a big friendship in my life. My best friend Ethan and I have been besties since we were five years old. He’s moved from coast to coast over the years, putting us hundreds of miles apart, and we’ve managed to stay as close as ever.

I’ve made friends I love and adore as an adult and several of those are in the process of becoming a big friendship. That’s one of the tricky parts––sometimes friendships start strong and burn out, so only time will tell if it’s a big friendship.

Spending more time at home due to the coronavirus has meant that most of my friendships, even those with friends who live nearby, have been relegated to the online realm and have felt long distance, even if they’re not in actual miles. I also don’t know a single soul who hasn’t been feeling run down by Zoom burnout. (It’s a real thing! I read an article about how video chatting uses a different part of your brain than in-person communication.)

Which is all to say that I’ve spent a good chunk of time asking myself Who am I around when I feel my best? and Who brings out the best in me? One of the people who came to mind for both of these questions is my friend Sam. (You may know her as the friend who inspired my Etsy shop one afternoon in April 2019.) So I asked her if she wanted to read and discuss Big Friendship together as a one-on-one BFF book club.

I felt weirdly vulnerable asking her even though I trust her completely because 1) not everyone reads as much as I do and books are a time commitment and 2) reading a book about friendship with your BFF is basically like couples therapy. (Which, interestingly, Aminatou and Ann go to couples therapy when they hit a rough spot in their friendship and it really helps them!)

Sam and I haven’t had any issues in our friendship but at the time I was fighting with (or rather passive-aggressively not talking to) another one of my BFFs and was still figuring out what to do about it. (Don’t worry, she and I are fine now.) Part of me worried that if one of my big friendships was in the shitter, the friendship breakdown might be contagious. However illogical that might be, it’s how I felt at the time. So I saw me and Sam reading this book about friendship as a sort of preventive maintenance.

We read Big Friendship over the course of a month, meeting once a week (usually via video chat but sometimes in person in my back yard or a park where we can be 6 feet apart). In discussing the book, we also discussed our friendship and our friendships with others, though not to the point of breaking the trust of our other friendships. Mainly, we talked about ways we’d been let down in past friendships and what makes big friendships so hard to come by. That inevitably meant talking about the ways we’d fucked up friendships ourselves and let others down.

What I realized is that it only takes one person to break a friendship or let it fade away, but a big friendship is a concerted effort by the two people in it. A big friendship requires a mutual investment of time, energy, and resources into making the relationship thrive. Which is another reason I’m glad I chose Big Friendship for just me and Sam to read as a one-on-one book club, as opposed to a larger book club with half a dozen people or more.

While there totally would’ve been a level of vulnerability and shared intimacy among a small group, I think it was more powerful because it was just us. There are things you might say to your BFF that you wouldn’t necessarily say in a group, even perhaps a group of others you love. There’s just something different when it’s a one-on-one conversation.

Sam and I have decided to continue our BFF book club, though we won’t always read books about friendship. We’re already planning to read Untamed by Glennon Doyle and Queen of Tuesday by Darin Strauss. (Queen of Tuesday is a fictionalized account of an affair Strauss’s grandfather had with Lucille Ball. Sam and I first bonded over our love of I Love Lucy!) At the end of the day, I’m not overly concerned with what we’re reading because I get to spend time with her. Books and one of my BFFs, what could be better?

If you and your BFF haven’t read a book together, I highly recommend it. It’ll only make your friendship run deeper and grow stronger.