Friendship is having a moment. Connoisseurs of illustrious children’s television shows like K-Pop Demon Hunters or Frozen will have noticed that Prince Charming has been usurped by Girl Gangs. Sociological surveys report on friendship’s forward march into the tightly controlled territory of the nuclear family unit, with a 2023 Australian Institute of Family Studies Report finding that more of us identify friends as family, or “chosen family,” than ever before. And, as articles on heteropessimism go viral, figures on family violence remain grim, our working hours rise, gender norms become more rigid, hate crimes against minorities increase, and wars dominate the news, books and articles on the joys of amity proliferate.
Whether it’s symptomatic of the pluralisation of family forms over the past twenty-five years or a response to worsening social conditions — with friendship one of the few refuges where we can be authentically ourselves — it’s clear that friendship is back. After lying culturally dormant for much of the twentieth century, this most gentle, ephemeral and hitherto neglected of bonds is being given the recognition most of us attach to it in our everyday lives.
Writer Andrew O’Hagan’s delightful meditation On Friendship is the most recent contribution to this flourishing field. Here is a meandering, intimate, sage, witty and exquisitely written book that crafts a philosophy and poetics of friendship from a life spent collecting good friends and nourishing their bonds with literature, wine, road trips, laughter and chatter.
Those of us who know O’Hagan as a novelist and London Review of Books contributor encounter him here in enlarged form as a biographer whose empathy and gift for observation creates beguiling portraits of everyone from school besties to Seamus Heaney, as a dispenser of excellent advice on how to think through the ambivalences of friendship, and as a humanist whose meditations on amicable bonds provoke questions that strike at the heart of existence. Does every creature on earth yearn to be part of a double act? What is the secret language of friendship that exists between children and animals? Does death end a friendship or sanctify it, protecting it from human vagaries?
O’Hagan’s pompous-sounding title (surely only Susan Sontag is allowed to write “On” books?) can be forgiven: he is tapping into a rich tradition of writers and philosophers who, since the time of Cicero’s De Amicitia, have written about friendship’s meaning, definition, permutations, pleasures and perils. Like these writers, he is interested in getting to the core of friendship, divining the reasons for its gratifications, illuminating its role in our quest for human flourishing, distinguishing it from other forms of intimacy.
But unlike the philosophers, O’Hagan doesn’t declaim truths, he substantiates them in a shadow memoir. In no real chronological or thematic order, he drifts from childhood to national loyalties, to the death of friends, to friends met at work or on the internet, and friends who are animals or imagined — with each setting bringing into relief the essences, rules and nature of friendship in our time.
While he asks the reader to forgive him for universalising his own experiences, few could disagree with lines like: “A great friend can summon a new world order, and, best of all, the beginnings of a new person for you to be, tugged from the constraints of home and homily.” Or: “A friend is someone whom you repay for not wanting to possess you, and it may count among the nuances of love that we cannot extend that same consideration to those we fancy.”
Growing up in an affectionless, impoverished and poorly educated family in darkest Glasgow gave the young O’Hagan his first intimations of the emancipatory potential of friendship. Where his home was a zone of “adversities, unpaid bills, things you could never talk about, disappointments relating to the past,” with parents who worked but “didn’t enjoy working” and “didn’t seem to enjoy family life either,” friendship was “like a glass of cool water after a fever, a drink that was meant to last, quenching your worries.”
It was the eighties, a time when childhood bonds were forged in physical spaces separate to those of adults — in parks, railway yards, youth clubs and discos — and communication was via the blinks of a flashlight from one boy’s bedroom window to another: “two flashes meant: goodnight pal, three meant: see you tomorrow.” In this time before the internet, parents controlled information and a good friend was often valued for their capacity to dispense knowledge that adults were unlikely to share about records, bands, cigarettes or sex.
Against this background O’Hagan learns from his friends and in books like Charlotte’s Web that “the first great challenge of our social lives is to find the friend who might somehow match our capacity for wonder.” To make that search, he says, “felt like a creative act, a bold, differentiating effort of the soul.” Where a parent may demand that a child be “an aspect of [themselves],” a part of the family’s “group identity,” “a good friend will only require that you fulfill aspects of yourself.”
In framing friendship as a revolt against the nuclear family, O’Hagan follows in a long line of feminist and queer scholars who have mused on friendship as an alternative, more egalitarian model of relationship. Good friendships can’t tolerate what is all too often normal in romantic or marital relationships: possessiveness, gross power imbalances and a lack of reciprocity. Where romantic love is institutionalised through marriage and the family is tightly regulated by the state, friendship seems to frolic free, “outside the framework of established relationships, family and professional life, the people one sees every day,” as Michel Foucault put it.
Perhaps for this reason, it is seen as a stepping stone to maturation, to settling down to a life of suburban domestic misery with a spouse and two children. The real story, we were long told, lies in the wedding and the family, not in the riotous hens night or the close friendships that often outlast the marriage.
O’Hagan is one of a flurry of writers and thinkers turning this logic on its head. “I believe the ties of friendship are as important to the average person as every other form of romance, a set of loyalties that turn in the head like old records,” he declares early in the book, and it seems odd that this even need be argued.
Certainly, one of the many joys of O’Hagan’s book lies in eavesdropping on the conversations of his famous writer friends. Unlike actors and politicians, who O’Hagan categorically declares to be bad at friendship — the former are inconstant by profession, and the latter opportunistic — writers, he claims, have a genius for friendship. It goes with the territory. If friendship is a lesson in empathy and being humane, then so too is writing — neither works without a genuine curiosity for how it feels to be someone else.
In O’Hagan’s world writers are not “solitary as a cloud” but ensconced with friends who keep them anchored to the real (rather than the fabular worlds they often inhabit). In one of many passages that make you smile, O’Hagan writes: “I would argue that writers have a rare but not unhelpful sickness: we wish to manage time, to consort with life at the level of myth and to seek connections everywhere, which is why real camaraderie is so stabilising. Sometimes our friends are the only characters we know who are not invented, and yet, with the friend of genius, you make a leap into enchantment that also feels like home.”
Not all writerly friendships make that leap, however, and professional friendships are also valuable. Ezra Pound was woeful when it came to consoling T.S. Eliot about his marital woes but did a marvellous job of editing The Wasteland. “The job at hand was the thing they had in mind, and friendship took up a pencil,” O’Hagan writes, “Pound cutting and shaping Eliot’s masterpiece out of the common ground of their mutual respect.”
It is a testament to the joys of reading O’Hagan that one finds oneself often putting aside the book and thinking more deeply about an idea or googling a childhood friend to see what they’re up to. I also found myself remarking on the differences between O’Hagan’s universalising On Friendship and Tiffany Watt-Smith’s more unassuming history of female friendship. Like O’Hagan, Watt-Smith offers the reader a shadow memoir of her own life, but unlike O’Hagan she doesn’t pitch friends against family. Instead, she notes how being a parent meant old friends could not be given the same amount of time as before while new friendships with other parents were strikingly instrumentalist.
Rather than seeing this as a debased form of friendship, as Aristotle and Cicero would do, Watt-Smith argues that the sharing of labour and resources has always been fundamental to working women’s friendships, particularly if they are the primary carers of children. Where O’Hagan draws a sharp line between romantic relationships and friendship, Watt-Smith follows in a long tradition of feminist writers in delighting in the romantic friendships women have. At times I wondered whether O’Hagan’s book would have been better titled “On Male Friendships.”
In his least convincing chapter, O’Hagan goes for a jaunt around the British Isles with two good friends from Ireland and Scotland, who happen to be the poet Seamus Heaney and former LRB editor Karl Miller. The road trip itself is a blast: at moments you feel like you’re sitting in the car with Seamus as he muses on what makes “good company” and whether John McEnroe would be fun at a dinner party. More provocative is O’Hagan’s extrapolation from this jolly group of white male writers and editors that an innate comradely bond arises from coming from the same country: “friendship and nationhood, like freedom and whisky, go soaringly together.” Nations, he later tells us “are simply the best huddle one can make of humanity.”
He is not always so blunt, and later he tries to distinguish their friendship from that of “tribal resentment or rabble-rousing passions” by virtue of their “taste for ambiguity” and the fact that he and his friends “resist the marks of resolution.” The chapter ends in a rhapsodic key: in travelling around the “byways and seascapes of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales” they had discovered not just the “truths” of their sense of fellow feeling but the ‘undertruths,’ the animating facts of belonging.”
Deep, chthonic and almost religious in nature, it’s hard to see the ambiguity or two-mindedness in this “undertruth,” nor any possibility of critiquing that which could only be authenticated as feeling. While Samuel Coleridge makes an excellent travelling companion for this happy huddle of pale males — and they cite from him often — I wonder whether a poet musing on the British slave trade would have been so welcome or aroused the same fellow feeling. The idea of common “undertruths” is also surely belied by the long history of violent resistance to British colonisation in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, sentiment that continues in contemporary nationalist movements, seen recently at the time of the referendum in stickers on Scottish lampposts proclaiming “Scottish not British.”
Coming as I do from Australia, where the myth of mateship has long worked to exclude women, migrants, homosexuals and First Nations people, the celebratory conflation of friendship with nationalism obviously irks. As does O’Hagan’s use of Benedict Anderson to justify his position: “If the nation… is an imagined community” he waxes, “so then is a friendship.” This is, quite simply, wrong. Anderson’s point was that the nation, which we imagine as natural, timeless and inevitable, is in fact historically contingent, and requires great leaps of the imagination to sustain.
The imagined community of the nation mythically cuts across the very real divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and geography, to foster a sense of cohesion among people who in fact may have little in common. And in the contest over the definition of the national character, or the “undertruths” it has been the experiences of European men that have largely prevailed. The thick ties between friends, people who thrill to each other’s differences as much as their commonalities has little to do with the generalising, exclusionary smear of nationalism.
Where mateship is built on an abstract ideal, friendship is the stuff of concrete encounters and “workaday” kindnesses; if a real connection is not there then friendship simply dies away. A nation does not.
Yet O’Hagan might have a point. While reading On Friendship I was reminded of taking my ninety-four-year-old grandmother on a road trip around the lower Snowy Mountains region, where she grew up. She was — and still is — sprightly, warm and chatty and felt that to tell the story of who she really is we needed to go to where she was from.
Peering into the murky brown waters of the hydroelectric dam she told me about a lost city beneath it — Talbingo, a town she travelled through in a mail coach at the age of five. In the deserted town of Greg Greg where she had lived, she spoke of living on rabbits during the depression, of being bitten by a snake while hanging out the washing, of watching my grandad drive off in a plume of dust, thinking that he’d never come back.
Of course, like Coleridge for O’Hagan, there is a repertoire of Lawson and Patterson ballads that give sentimental weight to these memories. But is it not also true that our identities and who we are is tied to place, to where we live? Does denying the reality of these feelings leave the nation in the thrall of the “rabble rousers”? And if this is so, could friendship — a term more pluralistic than mateship, a bond that delights in difference and that demands genuine equality and choices — be a more ideal foundation for the multiple stories people from Australia tell about themselves? Is nationalism imagined as friendship a better ethical framework — one capable of embracing ambiguity, conflict and two-mindedness?
For any reader of the LRB, O’Hagan’s meditation feels a bit like attending one of Boswell’s dinners, though in place of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick we sit with Colm Toibin, Edna Ryan or Seamus Heaney. Lest there be any concern that he might be namedropping, he reassures us that this is in fact a feature of any good friendship: “name dropping is to friendship what manure is to roses: it smells dodgy but it helps things grow.”
It is from this wonderful coterie of companions that O’Hagan distils some truisms of friendship that are sage, warming and astute. Friendship is a workaday virtue. Everyone wants a friend who sides with you whether you’re right or not. It’s difficult to know when precisely a friendship is formed, but “as in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over” (this line is from Boswell himself). “A person with new friends is never truly old, because they are forced to live in the present.” Friendship “shouldn’t rely on diaries and appointments but might flower by chance in places generally agreed to be conducive to the clinking of pewter.”
And finally: “The beginning of friendship is more than the start of your social existence: it is the test, the measure, the guarantee of your empathy, and the beginning of so much fun. Romantic love gets all the headlines, the novels the musical standards and the big cinema moments, but just as often it is strong friendship that properly describes the shape of your life.” •
On Friendship
By Andrew O’Hagan | Faber | $24.99 | 160 pages
