We talk on Skype, Friedman calling early in the morning from Los Angeles, where she is at home, “combobulating myself”, and Sow from Long Island, accompanied by midday bright sunshine and birdsong. Anyone who has ever experienced the pain of a friendship break-up, yet lacked the words to describe it, will find plenty to take from Big Friendship. You get the sense, though, that they are using their personal story, with its ups and downs – and there are such downs that at one point, they go to couples’ therapy to salvage their relationship – to sneak in a manifesto of modern friendship, and how to navigate big, emotional platonic relationships successfully. In fact, they like each other so much that they have written a joint memoir of their lives together as friends and colleagues (both are writers and have been co-hosting a podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, since 2014, “for long-distance besties everywhere”). Those butterflies turned into a decade-long, and still going, best friendship. But I think the excitement is the same, the butterflies are there.” “We just do not understand them to be an intense emotional experience on the same level that we would give to a romance, for example. She has heard other friends talk about that same feeling of excitement when it comes to the very beginning of a new, platonic relationship. It’s such a vivid episode in my mind.” When Sow got home that night, she found a friend request from Friedman, now 38, on Facebook. “I remember just the pang of… Ahh, when am I going to see this person again? That feeling.

“I can tell you for a fact that I viscerally remember the moment Ann and I walked in different directions,” recalls Sow, 35. W hen Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman first met, at a viewing party for the teen drama Gossip Girl in 2009, each recognised a kindred spirit.

Big friendship book review