NEW BOOK COMING YOUR WAY!
Introducing FRIEND GROUP: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE LONELIEST CENTURY
I wanted to send a quick, totally abnormal Thursday morning email to tell you about the new book I’m working on — which is very much the result of conversations we’ve had here. It’s called FRIEND GROUP: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE LONELIEST CENTURY. I’m going to focus on 1) how we got here and why it feels the way it does but, more importantly, 2) how we can make the big and small decisions to foster community and friendship….and create the sort of care and intimacy you’ve been looking for. If you need it and crave it like I do, I want us to work together to figure out how to make it happen.
I’m back working with the editor of my first three books, Kate Napolitano, who not only deeply fucking gets it, but also walks the walk (lives the life?) of prioritizing friendship and community in her own life. She’s also given me a long runway to do a bunch of reporting, and while I have ideas about what (else) I want to read and who I want to interview and how I want to arrange the chapters, they’re going to made even better by your suggestions and stories. So: what should I be reading? Who should I be talking to? Whose stories should I be paying attention to — maybe yours?
A very incomplete list of what I’d like to hear more about:
Stories of “untraditional” housing (buying a house with a friend or another family, other forms of intentional and unintentional co-living)
Deliberately moving in walkable proximity to a friend
Dudes figuring out how to be friends with other dudes during the friendship dip
Cultivating inter-generational community with people who aren’t related to you
Moving back to your hometown and figuring out what community looks like now
People becoming single parents on purpose — and finding community with other single parents (or other people who become your care network)
Becoming a significant person in the life of a kid who’s not *technically* related to you
How community fridge and mutual aid groups formed during the pandemic have evolved
How you took the dream of “all of the friends living together when we retire” and made it a reality — before retiring
I’m opening the comments below to everyone, so please feel free to forward to others you think would be interested. And if you want to share something but want to do it privately — you can always email me at annehelenpetersen at gmail.com.
And if you want to revisit some of the pieces that led to this book, I’ve pasted a few below. And if you have thoughts, suggestions, general excitement — I can’t wait to hear it!
Hi! I have a personal story about an unconventional/deliberate housing situation that I've shared in the Culture Study comments before. My partner and I lived in New York until 2021. A week before we were supposed to move into a new house, a tree fell on it and literally *cut it in half*. Coincidentally, my brother, who owns a two-flat in Chicago, had his upstairs tenants moving out that very same week. So, my partner and I packed what we could in the trunk of our tiny car, placed everything else in a storage unit, put our 65 lb dog in the backseat (on a lot of anxiety meds!), and drove halfway across the country to stay in their totally unfurnished upstairs unit while we figured out alternative housing in NYC. Turns out, living above my brother and his wife, who are both my best friends, and their dog-who is my dog's best friend-was the happiest situation I'd ever found myself in, bar none. I spent a whole summer alternating between crying about the idea of leaving, and panicking about the idea of totally changing the direction of our lives and staying. Two years later, we're still here, but now we have furniture. My dog and my brother's dog go back and forth up and down between apartments all day. We hang out casually and constantly - we pop in to say hi, run up/downstairs to grab a coke, play crosswords by screencasting the NYT app from the ipad onto the flatscreen, and share friends and a social life. It was the scariest thing in the world deciding to stay, but it feels like the closest thing to utopia I'll ever know.
I would love for there to be some discussion (maybe a chapter?) about the real ways that long-distance (especially online) friendships can be real and important...but how they're insufficient. I feel like people either view them as a replacement for in-the-flesh friendships, which they can never be, or dismiss them altogether as unimportant. Anything that treats both their strengths and weaknesses seriously would be appreciated.