Friendship

There’s nothing easy about friendship, though Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman surely make camaraderie seem as effortless as breathing. Between co-hosting the wildly popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, which finds the two connecting from opposite coasts to being invoked as friendship experts in such publications as the Washington Post and the Guardian, Sow and Friedman have become interlinked both in public and outside of it. They met more than a decade ago in Washington, D.C., when both were in the tumult of transition—Friedman moving from California, where she’d been so comfortable in her environment but frustrated with her job, and Sow moving on from a job that felt unsatisfying—and the pair quickly bonded over a mutual love of Obsession and other bad movies and a shared interest in denim skirts.

Since then, as Friedman has returned to California and Sow has found her professional footing in New York, they’ve forged what they call a big friendship—one that has changed them both, made them interrogate their own behaviour, and helped them become better friends not only to each other but to others as well. But no matter how long you’ve been friends, Sow and Friedman make it clear that sometimes, “deep, lasting friendships, like ours, need protection—and, sometimes, repair.” There’s a cost to being professional friends—two people who others label as “goals” or mimic in their own friendships—and Sow and Friedman’s best-selling book, Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, which was released on July 7, not only takes us on their friendship journey, including the many breakdowns that have occurred but also helps us better situate friendship as one of the most significant relationships in our lives.

Though relationships with blood relatives and romantic relationships are treated with attention and care, friendship is supposed to be malleable, shaping itself around everything else happening in your life. But Sow and Friedman, with the help of many brilliant scholars, explain the investment we must make in our friendships in order for them to go from zero to a Golden Girls–Esque bond and even detail how we can fix friendships when they’ve gone off the rails. In their interview with Glamour, Sow and Friedman cover everything from how to keep capitalism out of their relationship to the reasons we should celebrate friendship origin stories.

Glamour: The book opens with a trip you took to Napa, California, that was low-key an attempt to repair your broken friendship. Why did it feel necessary to begin there?

Aminatou Sow: That decision happened in the last draft of the book. We’d gotten this very consistent feedback that the first three chapters—people didn’t use the word boring, but that’s how we received it. We crave direct feedback, so we were really like, What is everyone trying to tell us? One of our readers told us that the thing she was missing was why should she care. Why should you care about the two of us at the beginning of the book? 

We were really trying to arrive at the truth that friendship is work and that work is worthwhile.

We’re part of this conversation about friendships always being a celebration. We host Call Your Girlfriend and we’re known for being friends. It’s very cute, it’s true, and it’s nice, but we were really trying to arrive at the truth that friendship is work and that work is worthwhile. We wanted to shine a light on how friendship became work in our own relationship. So much of the public story of our friendship is that we’re good friends to each other, and it’s very effortless. It’s so important, particularly for women, to be honest about what is true in your life and what is not true. We both wanted to honour that place of saying people know us for being easy, breezy, good friends. But the truth is that we have a good relationship because our relationship is work.