The pair-who have been friends for 10 years-are “obsessed with each other’s brains,” Sow says. “Ann Friedman is my Big Friend…and truly my dream collaborator,” Sow said. “It’s cliché to say, but we wrote the book we wanted to read,” she says. So she and Friedman set out to explore this in writing. “That’s the question.” At its core, Sow says, Big Friendship boils down to a central query: “How do you keep a close friend?” “Oh my god, how the fuck are modern people doing it?” Sow says. Though she’s not sure this era has an increased quantity of books, movies, TV shows, and the like featuring friendship between women, the quality has changed: “I’m not sure we have more of it, but it definitely feels different.” And though there may already be plenty of friendship stories out there, Sow noticed “what wasn’t there was two people talking about the same friendship.” Friendship is beautiful and necessary and vital, but it can also be super hard. “Particularly friendship between women, but also friendship between men.” She referenced The Group by Mary McCarthy and Sula by Toni Morrison, and “the wave of the feelings that everyone had about the Ferrante novels.” In recent years, “there has definitely been more media making around friendship,” Sow says. “There have always been good novels about friendship,” Sow tells us. We figured the duo who wrote the show “for long-distance besties everywhere” would also (figuratively and literally) write the book on friendship, and they delivered.
As they put it, “We care deeply about the lived experiences of non-famous women who are just trying to get through the week.” So when we heard they wrote a book together, aptly titled Big Friendship, we were first in line for a review copy.
With BFF Ann Friedman, she created the show that you and your smartest friend have always said you should start one day, calling each other weekly from opposite sides of the coast for the past six years, technically to discuss pop culture and politics, but in practice it winds up being about everything. You probably know Aminatou Sow as one half of everyone’s favorite podcast, Call Your Girlfriend.
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