The Friendship Cure - Kate Leaver

Our best
friends, Twitter followers, gal-pals, bromances, Facebook friends, and long
distance buddies define us in ways we rarely openly acknowledge. But as a
society, we are simultaneously terrified of being alone and already desperately
lonely. We move through life in packs and friendship circles and yet, in the
most interconnected age, we are stuck in the greatest loneliness epidemic of
our time. It's killing us, making us miserable and causing a public health
crisis. Increasingly, we don't just die alone; we die because we are alone. What
if meaningful friendships are the solution?Journalist Kate Leaver believes that friendship is the
essential cure for the modern malaise of solitude, ill health, and anxiety and
that, if we only treated camaraderie as a social priority, it could affect
everything from our physical health and emotional well being. Her much-anticipated
manifesto, The Friendship Cure, looks
at what friendship means, how it can survive, why we need it, and what we can
do to get the most from it. Why do some friendships last a lifetime, while
others are only temporary? How do you "break up" with a toxic friend? How do
you make friends as an adult? Can men and women really be platonic? What are
the curative qualities of friendship, and how we can deploy friendship to
actually live longer, better lives?From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the
extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and
stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her "squad"
to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship. For readers of Susan Cain's Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert's Big
Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating
blend of accessible "smart thinking," investigative journalism, pop culture,
and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the
wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.