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Posted on 17 May 2018 in Non-Fiction | 2 comments

KATE LEAVER The Friendship Cure. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

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There’s an antidote to loneliness, one Kate Leaver believes in powerfully, as her debut book The Friendship Cure shows.

There is serious competition for the title of most pressing health epidemic of our time, including workplace stress, mental illness and sedentary lifestyles. But Australian author Kate Leaver has another suggestion – loneliness. She offers some compelling evidence, drawn from a meta-analysis of scientific research into loneliness that concluded, in part:

Loneliness is more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and deadlier than obesity … It can tighten our arteries, raise our blood pressure, increase our rates of infection, diminish our heart health, and lead to higher rates of cancer. Lonely people develop tumours faster, have weaker immune systems and lower thresholds for pain.

While urging us to recognise loneliness as a pressing threat, Leaver also reassures us. There’s an antidote to loneliness, one she believes in powerfully, as her debut book The Friendship Cure shows. Research ‘suggests friendship has a very real and powerful effect on our physical health’ and having a caring social network of close friends may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s, obesity, heart problems and high blood pressure, and improve your chances of staying fit.

In fact, friendship is good for us in myriad ways. Having a close friend at work can improve attention span, mood and even productivity. And while friendship can’t cure depression, spending time with friends and cultivating strong friendships can be part of good mental healthcare practices, alongside healthy eating and exercise.

Combining scientific research, interviews and memoir, The Friendship Cure explores the many benefits of friendship, along with a few of the perils, such as toxic friends and friendship break-ups. Studded with pop-culture references and anecdotes of both successful and failed friendships, it considers the meaning of friendship and how it functions in our social lives, at work, and online. Throughout, Leaver’s style is chatty and personable. She shares her personal battle with depression, talks about her dog, Lady Fluffington, and mentions cookies and ice cream as mood boosters alarmingly often.

Three early chapters delineate friendship along gender lines, culminating in a lengthy exploration of whether men and women can really ‘just be mates’. Of course they can, as Leaver concludes, and sure, women and men are known to have different friendship styles. There are a few interesting points here, such as the rise in representations of female friendship in pop culture, a topic that has, ‘until recently, been too threatening to the patriarchy to appear with any prominence’. Still, so much gender-specific discussion feels a bit dated.

Move past these chapters, however, and The Friendship Cure becomes fascinating and vital – because friendship is vital, as Leaver shows. It is ‘at the centre of humanity and … to understand it is to understand ourselves’. While friendship is a human instinct, it’s also a skill, one we receive no formal guidance in. Leaver thinks we can do better at friendship, and combines her playful meditations on the varied natures of friendship with insights and practical tips.

Consider friendship break-ups. Socially, we expect and generally allow for grieving and recovery time after romantic break-ups, and the number of songs about the experience attests to that. Friendship break-ups are much less discussed, however:

It is a very rare thing indeed to find a candid or insightful depiction of a friendship breaking up … It feels like a mildly revolutionary idea that a friendship could be as important to someone emotionally as a romantic relationship and that, consequentially, its ending will be just as painful.

Friendship break-ups can be worse than romantic break-ups because they can feel more personal. While we understand the need to find our one and only, best-suited romantic partner, we generally have space in our lives for multiple friends. So when a friend decides that he or she no longer wants your companionship, it can be unexpected and hurtful.

Throughout the book, Leaver includes thumbnail portraits of friendships, both her own and others’. One of these describes a friendship that ‘ceased to exist with the brutal suddenness of death – but we have no way to mourn someone who is still alive’. This left the quasi-bereaved friend with an ‘aching feeling of inexplicable loss’. Leaver offers a refreshing guide for how to break off a friendship in a respectful way and, conversely, how to handle a painful friendship break-up.

The shortage of nuanced portrayals of friendship break-ups is also striking when friendship is so central in our movies, books and TV shows. This imbalance may be a factor in the loneliness epidemic. In describing one interviewee struggling with loneliness, Leaver notes the ‘gaping chasm between her life and the life promised to her by the sitcom Friends’.

We are vulnerable to loneliness throughout our lives. More than just a feeling, loneliness takes a physiological toll, and can increase risk of death by at least as much as 30 per cent. There is a cure, but, as Leaver acknowledges, it requires ongoing effort, both at an individual and societal level. She offers this manifesto:

We need to value and invest in the friendships we already have, as well as making new ones when the opportunity arises. We need to teach ourselves and each other how to be resilient in our own company. We need to revive our attention to our emotional needs and decide to actively define ourselves by our character, not just by what we do for a living or how hard we can work or how much success we can accrue in a lifetime. We need to prioritise companionship over fame, empathy over ambition and kindness over wealth.

KATE LEAVER The Friendship Cure HarperCollins 2018 PB 294pp $29.99

Ashley Kalagian Blunt has written for Griffith ReviewKill Your Darlings and Sydney Review of Books. Her memoir Full of Donkey: Travels in Armenia was shortlisted for the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. Visit her website and find her on Twitter: @AKalagianBlunt

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

2 Comments

  1. Ooooh, what an interesting topic!! And it sounds like Leaver has left no stone unturned. Does she explore the impact of pets on loneliness at all? Dog-owners in particular, I recall, live longer and have lower reported rates of depression and isolation – perhaps human friendship isn’t the only kind with a protective effect? Thank you for sharing your thoughts! 🙂

    • Hi Sheree, she certainly comments on the positive impacts of her own pet, anecdotally. But the book is focussed on human-to-human friendship, though you’re right, there are certainly additional ways to address loneliness, including learning to be content in our own company, which she also mentions.