I have (whisper it) a new book coming out

and here is its gorgeous cover

Today is an exciting day for me, gentle drumroll please. Faber & Faber, the UK publishers of my new book, have just dropped their gorgeous cover.

Do you love it? I do.

The book is coming out in the 24^th April in the UK (and in the US in early May….more on that soon)

In my experience, these final weeks before publication are among the strangest in the life of an author. You’d think you’d be shouting in celebration from the rafters. But mostly it’s an ambivalent time. Part of you wants to protect the book you’ve been quietly working on and loving into being for such a long time (in my case, five years). And then there’s the part of you which knows you just have to take a deep breath and hoof it out the door, and hope that out there in the big wide world, it will find its people, the ones who will love it as much as you did.

The book is about friendship between women, and is the most personal book I’ve written. It’s about the dangerous fantasies our culture creates about what friendship ought to be like, and about learning to live with its ordinary, imperfect realities and unexpected possibilities.

‘This is an unusual sort of love letter to friendship. I wanted to read, not of grand gestures, but of puny failures. Of attempts rather than successes. Of tender possibilities, rather than glossily packaged and indestructible images of perfection. I wanted a more flexible understanding of the meaning of friendship. And in the paradoxes and contradictions of a century of women’s lived experiences, I found one’.

It tells the story of friendship from girlhood to old age, and from the 1900s to the present day. We meet the boarding school girls with crushes on each other, and incarcerated women forming rapid bonds of trust. We visit factories and film sets, suburban streets and urban ghettos, hospital wards and all-female communities. We encounter friends in dusty archives and long-forgotten writers and activists. We learn about friendship traditions and rituals from different cultures, and meet the many women I interviewed – from workplace friends, to groups of older women who have chosen to live together as they age. And of course, my own friendships are woven into this story too.

This is a book which I hope will bring you new perspectives on friendship and what it means here in the 21^st century. I wrote it to tease out the unspoken assumptions and expectations we hold around these deeply important bonds, and to unpick the cultural forces that have shaped many of the beliefs about female friends we are unwittingly in thrall to. But I also wrote it out of a desire to reimagine what friendship might be.

Living in a moment of acute loneliness, where retreating and staying apart can seem the safest option, Bad Friend is a manifesto calling for a new and more expansive way to embrace the practice and pleasures of friendship in all our lives.

There have been some really lovely messages of support about it already. Here are just a few of them:

'‘Tiffany Watt Smith writes beautifully, lucidly and provocatively about female friendship and love. Part history, part memoir, this is a wonderful, tender, joyous book. I urge you to read it.’ (Suzannah Lipscomb, author of Six Queens: The Wives of Henry VIII)

‘Brilliant, brave, clever, funny and tender. A hymn to friendship: not friendship in its idealised, unrealistic form, but in its messy imperfections, its compromises and uncertainties, and in the strength it takes from being forged in difficulty. Bad Friend will leave you moved, hopeful and inspired in equal measure.’ (Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson)

‘I absolutely loved Bad Friend...The tenderness with which she probes the historical records in search of women's friendships matches the thoughtfulness with which she examines her own life. The book had me thinking anew about one of the fundamental categories with which we navigate our lives.’ (Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again)

'I loved it. It was wonderful to learn more about how the culture of women’s friendships has evolved, but more than that, I’m grateful for how Bad Friend gave me the chance to reflect on and appreciate my own friendships with women – past and present – and excited for the future life of those friendships.’ (Amy Key, author of Arrangements in Blue)

Faber are offering a whopping 30% off for anyone who wants to pre-order through their website. The code is podcast30. (They say they’ve checked it works this morning, but message me if you experience any issues, and i’ll follow up with them)

And if you’re a US based subscriber, fear not! Your time will come soon…

I’ll be posting more about some of the ideas in the book in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.

til then,

Tiff x