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3 obres 252 Membres 9 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Kayleen Schaefer is a journalist and author of Text Me When You Get Home and the bestselling Kindle Single memoir Fade Out. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue; and many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Obres de Kayleen Schaefer

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Coneixement comú

Data de naixement
c1980
Gènere
female

Membres

Ressenyes

wow okay so.

i thought this was going to be about how women trans women / femmes navigate dangerous spaces by supporting each other through technology. nah, i just misread the title.

thats ok! sounds good anyways.

instead, it was a story about female friendship. or, more accurately, a history of the author's various friendships and sororities with some pop culture references thrown in. it felt narrow in its scope, selective in its tone and exclusionary in its examples.

saccharine sweet, straight af and dripping with heteronormativity, this was so boring and dry, even for its delightful references to older tv shows.

full of excuses, brief one-lines about queerness, black lives matter movements and how trans women felt excluded from feminist movements.

i kept waiting for a big reveal. for the build, the gradual peeling back of the curtain where i would get some great insight into how the world works and learn something about how (cis) women form friendships. and i never really did.

also, i kept waiting for her to talk about asexual people and how platonic intimacy is so important in their lives. nah. altho she did use chosen family (a queer concept) in relation to some straight people? so, there's that.

also, she mentioned #squadgoals with taylor swift, bella hadid and other famous people. and she mentions lena dunham like four separate times. it's peak white feminism and there are so many times when the author just completely ignores her privilege altogether.

i wanted so much more richness. so many more layers. i didn't get any of that.

i read this, so you don't have to.
… (més)
 
Marcat
lydia1879 | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Feb 1, 2020 |
4 stars: Very good

From the back cover: For too long, women have been told that we are terrible at being friends, that we can't help being cruel or competitive, or that we inevitably abandon each other for romantic partners. But we are rejecting those stereotypes and reclaiming the power of female friendships. ...Schaefer also includes her own history of grappling with a world that told her to rely on men before she realized that her true source of support came from a strong tribe of women. Her personal narrative and celebration of her own relationships weaves throughout the evolution of female friendship on-screen, a serious look at how women have come to value one another and our relationships. Text Me When You GEt Home is a validation that has never existed before. A thoughtful, heart soaring, deeply reported look at how women are taking a stand for their friendships and not letting go.

--------------------

This book was loaned to me from one of my best female friends, my "team mate", Lisa R. I loved it much more than I expected to and actually gifted a copy to my mom/friend LLF. A delightfully fun read that challenges the notion than women are catty, and reminds me what I've always seemed to know: that my closest friendships and the people who support me most, are my women friends.

Some quotes I liked:

"I didn't expect to be where I am now, making female friendship the center of my story. But when I decided I wasn't ready to marry my long term boyfriend in my early thirties, I looked around, and instead of being unsure, I was inspired. Surrounding me were a bunch of women who were doing exactly what I wanted to do: striving to do good work, setting themselves apart, and aligning themselves with amazing people. They were also really fun. This crew, these women who I think are the coolest, became essential to my identity and psyche.

It feels like I'm part of a team, even if some of the women on it don't know each other. When I'm with my friends, no matter if we're gossiping or analyzing something serious, we're always tripping over each other trying to express how much we emphasize with what the other person is saying.

Women who might have assumed they could find care, kindness, and deep conversations only in romantic relationships are no longer limited to that plotline. Whether women marry or not, whether they have children or not, their friends are fundmental parts of their lives that they won't be giving up.

After she and her husband divorced five years ago, Renee became what she calls purposefully single with her sons and her girlfriends as the priorities in her life. 'I went through a host of dating sites...and I decided I really love my life. The right thing will come or it won't, and the time that I have away from my kids, I have to make the highest and best use of and its never wasted on girlfriends."

I'd believed that being too girly would hold me back, but that wasn't true: I was holding myself back by pretending to be a one dimensional woman. Plus, I was undermining and dismissing my sex by not seeing us as complex people who shouldn't have to conform to anyone's standard of what's cool or not.

For the first time in my life, I treated pursuing and tending to friendships seriously. It could have gone other ways: I could have sequestered myself in my apartment and numbed myself with television or forced myself to go on 50 first dates in 50 days. Instead, what I wanted to do in the hours when I wasn't working or sleeping was spend time with other women. I didn't see this as a stopgap. I wasn't after low stakes friendships or people who felt safe to hang out with while I regrouped and tried to figure out the marriage thing. I wanted my friends to consider me as necessary as they had become to me.

I think the most solid, supportive friend alliances are as hard to come by as heady as any fairy tale love. During my early thirties, I started to tell my friends I loved them, and I did it a lot. On the way home after a night with a friend, I felt almost the same way I would after a good date with a guy, intoxicated by how understood I felt and hopeful for how the relationship might develop even more. It was an unexpected emotional rush, one extremely different from how I'd once felt about my female friends when they'd been orbiting my life as odds and ends that I'd reach out to occasionally.

When [friend] Julia died, Stephie was bothered by some people not understanding how important Julia was to her, as if you weren't supposed to mourn best friends with the intensity you do family members.

She wants to be clear her friends aren't extraneous. She isn't very close to her family, and her mom passed away a couple of years ago. She's also committed to being single for a long time. 'So for me', friendship holds such a central place of importance. IT's always been a really big deal.'

But the concept of marrying your best friend is getting some pushback, both from experts and from men and women who want a best friend and a mate in different people. 'There is this tendency to look at the couple as the only source of gratification. A counter is the rediscovery of female friendship and the rediscovery of male friendship'.

My friends inspire me to pull myself together, to shake off whatever might be trying to rattle me that day, or to own what I've done well. Just being around them is often all the propping that I need.

It can hurt to break up with a friend just as much, if not more, than to break up with a lover, but women don't grieve these losses as publicly. When boys break out hearts we cry into pints of ice cream... when we lose our friends we barely even communicate about it, even though its an awful absence, too.
… (més)
 
Marcat
PokPok | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Dec 8, 2019 |
Honestly, this book feels like an overgrown Buzzfeed article. It's all over the place and doesn't have any cohesive organization.

But, at the same time, I feel like the book brought up some important points - friendship is IMPORTANT, and it should treated like it is important. So many people seem to be so dismissive about how deep and vital having healthy friendships is - and how much it hurts when those friends disappear from our lives, because society teaches us not to prioritize friendship once we're adults.

It doesn't help that I began to read this book and then was dumped by my "best friend" two days later (not because I was reading this book, haha). So it was painful for me to get through the rest of this book, but in the end, I'm glad that I finished it (I debated about returning it to the library and not finishing it), because it showed me that maybe my former best friend wasn't such a good friend after all.
… (més)
½
 
Marcat
schatzi | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | May 6, 2019 |
Best for:
Women needing a nudge to tend to their friendships with other women.

In a nutshell:
Through memoir and research, author Kayleen Schaefer explores the special bond women share, and how those bonds can be tested by society.

Worth quoting:
“It can hurt to break up with a friend just as much, if not more, than to break up with a lover, but women don’t grieve these losses as publicly.”
“Devoting ourselves to finding spouses, caring for children, or snagging a promotion is acceptable, productive behavior. Spending time strengthening out friendships, on the other hand, is seen more like a diversion.”

Why I chose it:
After moving back to London early last year, I’m simultaneously far away from some of my closest girlfriends and working on deepening new relationships with girlfriends I’d moved away from eight years ago. And trying to figure out how to do this in ways that make sense.

Review:
I haven’t ever had a squad of girlfriends. I wasn’t someone who shied away from having women friends (or girls as friends when I was kid); I just preferred more 1:1 time. At most, a group of three (including me) felt the best. I’ve never had long lists of close friends — or even not-so-close friends — I’ve just wanted to spend quality time with people who get me and who I get.

Right now, I’m dealing with a lot of different issues related to friendship. In addition to leaving my hometown after high school, I’ve made four big moves in my life where I’ve physically left friendships. During each move, some friendships dissipate, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; friendships don’t need to last a lifetime. But at the same time, especially as I get older (40 next year), I recognize the value, power, and beauty of someone having known me at different stages of my life, and me having known them. In fact, one of my closest girlfriends and I had a chat maybe five years ago, when she was dealing with some challenges as a parent. She shared how important it was that she still had friends like me and another of her close friends, who have known her since before she was a mom. We knew what she was like before, and could help her see how she still was that same woman in many (but not all) ways.

I’m also dealing with a friend who has, for lack of a better term, ghosted me. We’ve known each other for 16 years, and had stayed (what I thought was) good friends through her moving away, then me moving near her, then me moving away again, and now me being back in the same city. But as much as I’d thought and hoped that we’d pick up where we left off, I’ve not heard from her in months, and I don’t expect to. That’s hard.

That’s all background to say that when I saw this book, I knew I needed it, because I needed not a reminder that friendships are important, but permission to focus on making sure the existing friendships I have are tended to. Of course not all friendships will stay the same, and not all will need — or deserve — the same level of attention. But if we want to keep those relationships up (and we should), we need to work at them. And not as an afterthought.

Author Schaefer looks at the friendships girls and women have with each other through different stages of life. She focuses on how she treated female friendship first as a child in school (and examines the idea of ‘mean girls’), then as possible competition at the office, and then as a primary relationship in one’s life. She looks at the history of women supporting each other, and offers examples of times when women have supported their best friends through serious, trying times. She includes examples from pop culture as well as from people she knows.

She makes a strong case that we need to be supporting people in their friendships. The relationships we have with our partners (if we have one) or our kids (if we have any) are important, but friendships should be up there as well, and deserve our time and energy. Of course, that could seem like just one more thing we have to learn to juggle, but I think it’s more like something that, if we make the time, will give us much more than it takes from us.

The book obviously stirred up a lot in me, but I’m not sure it is a great book. I think it is good, and perhaps I was expecting less anecdata and memoir (which is on me, not the author), but it felt like some things were missing. There are also some areas where the author does demonstrate some ignorance (one section talks about women entering the workforce in the 50s which, I think she meant fairly well-off white women, because poor women and women of color have been working forever). In spite of that, I do think this is worth a read.

I could write more, but I’m off to dinner with two of my girlfriends.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Pass to a Friend
… (més)
 
Marcat
ASKelmore | Hi ha 7 ressenyes més | Mar 25, 2019 |

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Obres
3
Membres
252
Popularitat
#90,785
Valoració
½ 3.5
Ressenyes
9
ISBN
10

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