How hard is it to hang on to friends?

Never trust a woman with no girlfriends, goes an old adage. But what about a woman who struggles with those girlfriend relationships, who finds them both necessary and confounding, and craves connection but finds conflict?

Christie Tate is such a woman, and her memoir, “B. F. F.,” chronicles her endeavor to overcome her lifelong inability to maintain healthy friendships. This ultimately happens by way of finding, and then losing to cancer ( not a spoiler — it’s on the first page), her first nontoxic friendship.

Tate mines her past, from childhood on, as a “ruthless social climber who sought emotional security by elbowing out” girls who got in the way of friendships she deemed worthy, and as a woman who prized romantic relationships above friendship. In other parlance, she’s been a men- before- friends kind of gal, with a mean girl streak, until someone suggests that she’ll never progress in her recovery from both disordered eating and alcoholic codependency until she masters intimacy with women friends. “My life was a friendship graveyard,” she writes.

Then she meets Meredith, a woman with similar foibles and challenges in life, addiction, family and friendship. Both women consider themselves too “damaged by our history of addiction, too twisted by our pet ty jealousies, and too wounded from g rowing up alongside golden sisters” to be capable of mature friendship. But they decide to “face the work,” which entails things like honesty, forgiveness, writing a “vision” for themselves as good friends and expending as much energy on them as one does in marriage.

Meredith teaches Tate that healing is pain, “not warm lights and lavender pillows. It’s guts. It’s blood. It’s body parts shocked with new blood flow.”

Their success seems to stem from being similarly emotionally compromised. “In friendship, I’ve found connections that make me feel like I’m not the only woman walking the planet with a set of poisonous beliefs or rabid obsessions,” Tate concludes. None of this sounds, well, fun. Most of us seek refuge in friendship from more difficult relationships, but Tate and Meredith find the rewards worth the bother. “We do the work, we get the miracles,” Meredith promises Tate.

I related to many of Tate’s flaws: the solipsism of low selfesteem, assuming that no one else feels as she does. How selfawareness does not always lead directly to self- improvement. Being easily threatened, imposing motives onto others and then reacting to them as if they were unassailably true. We’re both grown women whose friendship skills stopped developing after middle school; I have befriended, and lost, some of the funniest, smartest ladies to traverse the befouled floors of the New York City subway. I even related to her description of herself as an “uptight teetotaler who liked to go to bed by 9: 30 after spending the day battling low self- esteem and anxiety.”

But I wasn’t sure how typical our experiences were. Are we unusually ill suited to navigate the rocky terrain of fraternal companionship? Or are our struggles, unlike our bedtimes, commonplace?

Tate doesn’t tell us. I found myself hungering for more psychological, historical and sociological insight into the intricacies and pitfalls of female friendship, not just into her own psyche. What renders a person friendship- deficient, beyond their own personality defects and childhood traumas?

I also longed for a more novelistic touch, to experience vicariously and viscerally the aching awkwardness of the moment you realize you’ve forever altered the tenor of the friendship. Some of her estranged friends felt more like names than characters; I wanted to be closer to them as a reader. Even Meredith appears too saintly until the end of the book — and her life — when Tate allows us to see her fumbles.

“B. F. F.” might have been a different book without the pandemic, which caused many of us to rethink our friendships, reconnecting with those we missed, holding tight to those we cherished and letting go of those who drained more than sustained. For me, it meant a recommitment to my beloved childhood friends and a greater ease in friendships — finally. The pandemic caused Tate to reach out to missing old friends, too, and to find forgiveness.

At times “B. F. F.” felt like too claustrophobic a look at a phenomenon that’s so much bigger than her fallen- apart friendships, though I applaud Tate’s willingness to expose her shortfalls and to work so hard to surmount them, and offer readers a way forward. I think this book will be well received in book clubs, inspiring discussions among women about the friendships that fell away, and whether or not — and how — to reclaim them.