This is a very personal and relatable account of cultivating and maintaining friendships throughout challenging times and phases of life - not always a smooth process, which will resonate with many readers, as with myself. Or, as Day’s friend “Sathnam” puts it, hanging on to friends you don’t like is hardly a compliment to the people you do since “it means you’ll be friends with anyone who’ll have you”. The book is also available to purchase in the Royal Festival Hall foyers before and after the event.

Then, when a global pandemic hit in 2020, she was one of many who were forced to reassess what friendship really meant to them – with the crisis came a dawning her truest friends were not always the ones she had been spending most time with. A generous, companionable guide to a part of life every bit as crucial - and as fraught - as romance or family. I couldn't relate to her upper middle class select group of well connected "bright young things" type friends. This text has already served as a springboard for discussion and will no doubt continue to help me think productively about friendship and the role it plays in my life.There was a charity auction that night and, in my tipsy state, I started bidding on one of the lots. In general I'm ok with saying you have more than one best friend but Day has made it quite clear she only has one and that she's super special. Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Kelly proves a fastidious chronicler of their campaigning and if his prose is sometimes overly academic, it draws vitality from his subjects’ conviction that in alienating ourselves from nature, we curb our own happiness.

Those who consider the book in good faith might even find themselves Marie Kondo-ing their friendship circle – holding on to the ones that bring joy and clearing out the rest. This is a very personal and relatable account of cultivating and maintaining friendships throughout challenging times and phases of life - not always a smooth or rewarding process, which will resonate with many readers, as with myself. I spent a lot of my time missing the point of what she was trying to say because I was too busy rolling my eyes.As a journalist, she has written extensively across many titles, including The Observer, The Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Grazia and Elle.

One way of taking a stand against the spread of this mechanical language would be to stop lining the caps of confessional beggars like Elizabeth Day. It seems like a sad indictment of society that we even need to try and analyse friendships but the author sums it up herself…. This offer only applies to copies of the book pre-purchased with a ticket and is not available at the event itself. In conversation with close friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge for this exclusive live event, Elizabeth will unpick the significance and evolution of friendship to celebrate the publication of her new book Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict.Thank goodness Elizabeth Day is rectifying this with a fantastic book about the wonders - and enormous diversity - of true friendship. In recent years she has embarked on a project to offset her successful career as both novelist and journalist with various confessions of failure. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). I couldn’t take much from it as most of the case studies seem to be about the author feeling overwhelmed by keeping up with friends (which isn’t the case with me! It states very clearly on the cover that it is the Confessions Of A Friendship Addict and this is very much a confessional.

He couldn’t understand why I was still upset over the miscarriage and I failed to understand why he couldn’t. The read was cathartic and emotively connective, particularly in defining friendship expectations and how difficult it is to sever one that is not serving you. This is very different from my usual diet of crime thrillers and rom coms- I was interested to see what Elizabeth Day's take was on friendships across the passage of time.We’d somehow worked out that, because of the eight-hour time difference, I should probably start celebrating earlier (this is actually not how time works, but by that stage, we were too drunk to notice). Those are the midweek get-togethers (neither of you would dream of giving up a Saturday night to each other) which are somehow never as nice as they should be and leave you feeling down, depleted and as if it is somehow all your fault. This book embodies a chapter of life we shared, some that proceeded it and the unwritten ones yet to come. It’s such a unique friendship that when it came to writing my new book, Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, I knew I had to include it.