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A review by bassoonerd
The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away by Elissa Schappell, Jenny Offill
3.0
It was interesting to see different categories of friendship failure emerge- namely "grief" (one person is grieving and the other person wants to be supportive, but the dynamic is ineffective for one of many reasons) and "defining friendship in the context of sameness and then something external shows the two people to be dissimilar".
It wasn't a happy book to read, but it didn't bum me out as much as I expected it to be. The stories/essays were short enough that I didn't feel too much for the characters/people in them, so that probably helped. Plus, you knew going into a new story/essay that the friendship was going to fail, so as a reader I didn't feel blindsided.
The part of me that likes analyzing people and relationships really liked finding the categories and parallels. There's even one set of essays that's told from both sides and the differences are fascinating.
It wasn't a happy book to read, but it didn't bum me out as much as I expected it to be. The stories/essays were short enough that I didn't feel too much for the characters/people in them, so that probably helped. Plus, you knew going into a new story/essay that the friendship was going to fail, so as a reader I didn't feel blindsided.
The part of me that likes analyzing people and relationships really liked finding the categories and parallels. There's even one set of essays that's told from both sides and the differences are fascinating.