Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World

From the co-author of Tell Me Who You Are and a TED speaker, a book that reveals the importance of friendship as a tool of social justice.

Friendship is good for your health. Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Still, we are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Through her inspiring and impassioned prose, Vulchi entirely reimagines our platonic ties, revealing that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of love and resistance. Intimate and engaging, Good Friends offers a resounding cry that friendship is not only vital for our own individual well-being, but for humanity itself. It invites you to be inspired not just by what people do but how people love. It invites you to look at your friends differently and enter a dazzlingly fresh philosophy of human connection.

Priya Vulchi is the co-author of Tell Me Who You Are and was the co-founder of the non-profit CHOOSE, which she ran with her friend for over a decade. Vulchi was the youngest TED Resident ever, one of Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 Young People Changing the World, and one of Bitch Media’s Fifty Most Influential feminists. Her work has been featured in the The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Scholastic, Bustle, BBC, and more. She has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in African American Studies and Cognitive Science. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar.