August Reading List

These books might change your friendships

• Platonic by Marisa G Franco, Ph.D.

• Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

• Sisterhood Heals by Joy Harden Bradford, Ph.D.

• Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

• Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson

• Friendfluence by Carlin Flora

• Sula by Toni Morrison

Find the complete list at Bookshop or on Amazon.

This month’s reading list focuses on friendship! Friendships tend to be underrated in the hierarchy of interpersonal relationships, but friends shape our lives in a myriad of ways. Carlin Flora explores this concept in Friendfluence, which discusses the ways that friends can influence our lives. On the other hand, Marisa Franco’s Platonic takes the approach of how our life experiences can shape our views of friendships, by exploring the link between attachment theory and friendship, using the research in this area.

Sisterhood Heals also translates the research on friendship (and group therapy!) into how our friendships can be healing and tranformative in our lives, and the different roles that we can play in our friend groups. Text Me When You Get Home also explores the power of female friendships, and the uniqueness of these relationships.

Friendships are also complicated. In our fiction picks, Undead Girl Gang and Sula explore different ways that our friendships can be difficult, at different points in our life. Undead Girl Gang asks us how well do we know our friends as teenagers, and what we’d do to save them. Sula takes us into a complicated lifelong female friendship, exploring how friendship endures and morphs even as our lives radically change. Our final pick, Big Friendship, is by the hosts of the iconic friendship podcast Call Your Girlfriend, and Amina and Ann discuss what it takes to navigate a complicated friendship throughout massive shifts in life and career.

Happy reading!