Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship

A smart and thought-provoking memoir, history, and cultural critique about the turmoil and complexity of female friendship

Our culture today is awash with images of strong female friendships: the lifelong BFFs, the glossy gal pals, the enviable, hypersuccessful work wives. Yet cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith has always found her own life much messier. She has had dramatic friend breakups, friendships that felt like too much or not enough, friendships that drifted into silence, and friendships built on convenience rather than a meeting of minds. And with each failure, there are older cultural scripts to contend with. Which bad friend is she? The competitive rival, the jealous backstabber, the underminer, the fair-weather friend?

We have all been bad friends. It’s impossible to be a perfect one; as Watt Smith points out, women’s friendships have long been magnified, scrutinized, praised, and admonished, creating a legacy of impossible ideals. In Bad Friend, Watt Smith mines the rich cultural history of female friendship to look for a new paradigm that might encompass the struggles along with the joy.

About the Author

Tiffany Watt Smith is a writer, cultural historian, and author of The Book of Human Emotions and Schadenfreude. Her TED talk, “The History of Human Emotions,” has been viewed more than 4.5 million times. She is associate professor (emerita) of cultural history at Queen Mary University of London, where she ran the Centre for the History of the Emotions. Her academic research has been supported by numerous awards and prizes including from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy, and as a recipient of the distinguished Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and in 2024 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.