Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close

“If you listen to our podcast, you are probably screaming right now […] because our show is premised on us being tight-knit besties. (Stay sexy and don’t fake your friendship to keep your podcast afloat!) You might feel like we played you […] It’s far more accurate to say we played ourselves by spending so many months pretending that things were OK when clearly they were not.”

This quote employs direct address and humor to engage the reader, creating a sense of intimacy and honesty that characterizes the narrative voice throughout Big Friendship. The parenthetical advice “Stay sexy and don’t fake your friendship to keep your podcast afloat” serves as a self-aware nod to the performative aspects of the authors’ public personas, underlining the tension between their genuine friendship and the expectations of their audience. Their admission that they pretended “things were OK” offers a moment of critical self-reflection, revealing the complexities and vulnerabilities inherent in maintaining a friendship under the public gaze.

“We are not sharing our story because we think it’s exceptional. Quite the opposite. We’ve spent so much time examining our friendship because we believe many of its joys and pitfalls are pretty common.”

Here, Sow and Friedman utilize a declarative tone to assert the universality of their experiences. This approach democratizes their narrative, inviting readers to see parts of their own friendships in the book’s exploration of joy and difficulty. By emphasizing their intention to examine rather than to sensationalize, the authors lend their work an analytical quality that encourages readers to engage with their own relationships with a similar lens of introspection.