New Books by Elizabeth Day and Harriet Gibsone

This piece has just been published in The Spectator.

These books were such a contrast. First there was the Elizabeth Day, which was calm, quietly insightful, honest, and self deprecating. The book was about Day’s former addiction to making friends. It’s easy to see why - Day is personable and polite, the kind of person who would ask questions of her interlocutor and be genuinely interested in the answers. And since her advice is wise, it’s easy to see why people would want to be her friend after meeting her. Being a kind and selfless sort of person, she tended to accept overtures of friendship, even if she was not the party falling over herself to make a bond. But usually she was pleased to create these links. What could be wrong with making more friends? Her book offers food for thought on the subject.

I didn’t have space in my review to talk about her section on frenemies. This is such an interesting topic. Even defining a frenemy is fraught. Doesn’t a good friend offer tough love and the advice only a best friend would tell you (and here, I recall with a shudder the kind of situations covered in teenage girls’ magazines, like a friend introducing another to the concept of anti-perspirant/deodorant - and the sheer relief I felt as a teenager not to ever have been in that position)? But no, a frenemy is something subtly different. It’s someone you notice puts you down, plays a one-upmanship game, makes demeaning comments, expects you to be there for them but doesn’t bother to reply to your own emails for weeks. Personally, I think that frenemyship is a result of envy. Friends should always be happy for each others’ good news. But when you notice that someone is resentful of your achievements or belittles them, and puts you down; doesn’t invite you when they have get-togethers with their friends; cancels meeting you again, and again, because a better offer has come up; then you have to wonder whether that friend has become a frenemy.

And yet Day is remarkably generous about ex friends. She takes on the blame even when it’s obvious that she did nothing wrong. She doesn’t rankle with bitterness. This seems to me the most healthy way of dealing with finished friendships - ‘monstering’ those with whom you have fallen out seems not only immature but also an indictment on one’s own taste - you *chose* her as a friend. It’s only to be expected that people sometimes become aware of differences between them and people they once loved. You can either live with it and swallow your misgivings, or end the friendship. There is no right or wrong answer.

I found reading Day’s book soothing, like a balm. She divulges situations that chime with the reader’s own experiences, whether they are meeting someone who wants to become your best friend when there is no vacancy or those who expect you to always be in party mood. Reading the book, I thought what a good psychotherapist Day would make. Her best friend is one. Perhaps that’s why they get on so well.

Harriet Gibsone’s memoir certainly couldn’t be called calm or soothing. It starts off sweetly enough, with Harriet and her childhood friend discovering people-watching and getting addicted to spying on an elderly couple of neighbours. There is a moment of shock and pathos when Gibsone reveals that this phase came to an end when one of the elderly couple ‘disappeared’ - ie died. This changes the tone of the story and Gibsone misses the opportunity to show either sympathy or empathy. There doesn’t even seem to be a sober moment of childhood realisation of mortality

The sense I had when reading this book was that Gibsone thinks only of herself. There are plenty of wild anecdotes but she never explains what was behind her thinking when she, for example, stole Amy Winehouse’s foundation. Was she just being a clown to amuse her friends? But they clearly weren’t amused, they were bewildered.

Gibsone eventually calms down when she meets someone with whom she forges a mutually loving relationship where she reciprocates the attention in a healthy way. Then we move onto her urge to have a child and her sadness when she realises this will not be easy. Thankfully, by the end, she seems far more settled and at peace than she was in her youth.

Wild and entertaining as Gibsone is, there is only one of these women I would choose to have as a friend, and it isn’t her. But people have different taste. Some may find her obsessive ways and attention-seeking endearing. I was beginning to suffer from ennuie the third time she mentioned winning best looking pupil at school decades after the event.