Bad Friend

Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven - women who choose to live together in old age - of the present day. These 'bad' friends broke the rules about femininity they didn't write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful.

In this new history of women's friendship, Watt Smith untangles the larger forces acting on our intimate relationships to free us from their hold. Calling upon friendships shared between the Ali Bedouins of Egypt to those of prisoners in New York, between school girls in Japan and those among Romantic radicals in London, Bad Friend weaves together history, interviews and memoir to offer a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for 21st century life.