READS

Books BIG FRIENDSHIP

Promises that big work brings big rewards

By Emily Cunningham

In their new book, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman share their friendship story — but can readers apply their lessons to their own relationships?

Aminatou and Ann define ‘big friendship’ as a bond of great strength and significance that transcends the critical life changes that we all face.

Somewhere in the middle of the mess that was 2020, two women published their shared story of creating, building, traversing and mending what they refer to as their “big friendship.” In their aptly titled book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman recount the little victories and big misunderstandings, the ardent discussions and inside jokes that lend to their dually lived bigness. They believe that theirs is a common story that many women can relate to and experience together.

Aminatou and Ann define “big friendship” as a bond of great strength and significance that transcends the critical life changes that we all face. It is active, generous, reciprocal and confident that it can outlast any challenges that lay ahead as long as the big friendshippers collaborate with love, respect and honesty.

Their story sets up steadily but dives swiftly, exploring their shared yet separate experiences as women in the male-dominated political and journalistic worlds. They recall their childhoods spent in the wildly different worlds of Nigeria and Iowa in the 1990s. They disclose their perspectives and intimate conversations concerning skin color in an interracial friendship. They describe the strain that distance, chronic illness and outside relationships compound on top of feeling disconnected, and they analyze historical constructs of friendships between and among men and women.

This book is fierce but never hard to read. Simultaneously writing in first and third person, they tell a story in a shared voice with separate instances of defining their individual outlooks. It feels as breezy as reading a favorite novel under an umbrella on the beach in August. But as you make dinner, wrap up your day and go to bed, it’s impossible not to consider all that they’ve divulged and reflect on your own experiences.

Some aspects of their story might provoke defensiveness, especially if you’ve struggled to make authentic and long-lasting connections with other women. Maybe Aminatou and Ann overlap boundaries that some of us require. But these women continually remind us that every friendship is different and, as they note near the conclusion, that’s kind of the point. Regardless of how your friendship functions, you still have to show up and, well, work for it.

Big Friendship is a great option for book clubs, but consider this instead: Give a copy to that friend with whom you want to revive a relationship. Read it together. Embark on the journey together. Learn together. Move toward each other and move forward together. What do you have to lose? As Aminatou and Ann explicitly promise in their final words of the book, “If you take your friendships seriously, you won’t regret it. We never have.”

So, read the book. Have that difficult conversation. Find a reconnecting point. Experience it all, in your own ways but together, and remember to love each other through everything. If you’re in it together, it will be worth it. Z