Published in 2025
305 pages
Tiffany Watt Smith is a 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.
What is this book about?
A rebellious new history of female friendship and timely reclamation of the ‘bad friend’.
Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven – women who choose to live together in old age – of the present day. These ‘bad’ friends broke the rules about femininity they didn’t write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful.
In this history of women’s friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection. She takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, from prisons to film sets to hospital wards and elder communities, untangling the assumptions about good and bad friends we live by. Weaving together history, interviews and memoir, Bad Friend offers what’s long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.
