Table of Content
Schaefer salts her cultural analyses and interviews with her own experiences, though she casts herself as an unlikely chronicler of female friendship. As a kid, she saw other girls as competitors rather than potential buddies — an all-too familiar experience for many women. She spent some time early in her career working at a men's magazine, where she admired the male journalists and tried to be a "cool girl." Meaningful connections with other women didn't top her priority list. The specifics of the history of female friendship are not where the value lies in Text Me. Rather its Schaefer’s own exploration of friendship that rings true and will evoke memories and provoke thought from the reader.
For instance, we learn the history of Galentine's Day, which was created on Parks & Rec and has become an actual holiday women celebrate in the years since. Just thinking about Leslie and Ann's friendship makes me happy. Text Me When You Get Home is a good introduction to female friendship and feminism, but it certainly didn't challenging me or teach me anything I didn't already know.
More Books by Kayleen Schaefer
The users of #squadgoals in 2015 were starting an image shift. They were capturing and highlighting friendships they were proud of as they were going through life together. Anything on Instagram is a little bit perfected, but the emotion behind the photos didn't feel airbrushed. She goes on to say she quit the sorority after two years because she met a guy and didn't need to look for a boyfriend anymore (she wasn't in it to meet guys, though!) and he didn't like the Greek system anyway. I'm sure we did this to some degree, but I had friends who weren't in my sorority whom I thought were awesome and was conscious of not shutting them out.
Still, despite this, he concludes that Philips and all other women aren't as skilled at friendships as men are, simply because they're women. "I cannot say that women are capable of all of those excellences, by which men can oblige the world; and therefore a female friend in some cases is not so good a counsellor as a wise man," he writes. His answer, summarized, was that unlike many other men, he was okay with women having friends. He writes, "Madam, you may see how much I differ from the morosity of those cynics, who would not admit your sex into the communities of a noble friendship." He goes on to talk about how devoted women can be. "A woman can love as passionately, and converse as pleasantly, and retain a secret as faithfully, and be useful in her proper ministries, and she can die for her friend as well as the bravest Roman knight," he writes.
Interesting read with contradictory messages
And it's great advice, because she's been through it all, and she wants to tell you what she's learned. Her comic memoir and first book, Unqualified, will share Anna's candid, sympathetic, and entertaining stories of love lost and won. Part memoir, part humorous, unflinching advice from her hit podcast Anna Faris Is Unqualified, the book will reveal Anna's unique take on how to navigate the bizarre, chaotic, and worthwhile adventure of finding love.
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. This book about the power of female friendships was a little drier than I expected, but it was peppered with pop culture and personal anecdotes, which kept me reading. I was hooked when the book started with a long reflection on the movieBeaches--a movie I first watched with one of my childhood best friends when we were about ten. It quickly became our all-time favorite, and so this seemed like a book I was meant to read.
My Life as a Goddess
It used to be that when women married and had kids, they moved away from their female friends. They would befriend the mothers of their kids friends, rather than continuing to see the singleton friend from their career days. Now, with the blurring of lines between home, parenting, marriage, and career, women expect to prioritize female friends higher than before. She uses anecdotal evidence to prove that we used to think of girls as sweet and nice but now we tend to think of girls as cruel and catty. At any rate, this new emergence of Mean Girls is why so many women don't have or want female friends. But if we just stop assuming girls are mean, then we can bypass that myth and become better friends with other women.
I'm positive all the quotes you've found about women saying they "loved" each other in letters in the 1800s were just saying it as friends. I have the personality that I like to see something all the way through to the end but I just couldn't spend my time on this one. This was our June book club pick and I really wanted to like it but I just didn't. You'll note there are two stars up there, rather than the -1 I'm making it sound like this deserves. I even sent a text-shot to my own BFF It sparked a good, and maybe a bit weepy, conversation which I think is what this book was meant to do.
Like anyone gathering life experience, Schaefer comes to realize that women are as nuanced and deep as she believes herself to be. She abandons the marriage credo and begins devoting that energy into growing her friendships. But her view on female friendships isn't unique among women of her generation. She's in her seventies now, and no longer feels like she has to soldier on being devoted only to her family.
She just didn't understand that fraternities and sororities pair up even though she's clearly watched all the movies and shows about this. Later, she expresses how foolish she was to think the sorority girls who were soooo excited to see her were truly excited to see her during rush. Again, despite being socially trained by Hollywood, if not by the women in her family circles, she didn't understand how this all works. All she seemed to do is interview a handful of people about how they met their best friends, and then watched whatever was on TV that day and commented on the female relationships that were being portrayed. I will be publishing my socio-economical analysis of the ABC show 'Once Upon a Time' any day now. Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts?
Even generic stock images show how much fun it is to be friends with other women. For instance, she cautions against assuming that, nowadays, "girls are mean," which is a prevalent belief in today's American communities. To see what your friends thought of this book,please sign up. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
It is a very timely and important book, however, and one I'm so glad was published. It made me realize how lucky I am to have all the women in my life that I do, both past and present, and recognize that the "all-in-one" family idea is perhaps no longer relevant for our time. Instead, we all need a group of female friends who will text us when they get home. An examination of the importance of female friendship, Text Me When You Get Home is sure to inspire a reflection about the role of female friendship in your life.
I was really excited to read this because it’s such an important topic, but I quickly found myself disappointed. This book reads like a series of very long blog posts by a college freshman. (And if it were, I might’ve liked it more.) The writing just isn’t very good and seems unedited.
Friendship doesn't always look like #squadgoals, though it certainly can. #squadgoals, however, always looked like women who were in freshman dorm or summer camp together finding out they liked each other and showing their enthusiasm for their unit to the world. It lacked a sense of permanence, focusing solely on youth and exuberance and exciting moments. I did a lot of eyerolling at her un-self-aware stories. But, honestly, this isn't even a new thing, mean girls have always existed.
I've read a lot of nonfiction books, and they can often move slowly, even if they are saying important things. Not so withText Me When You Get Home; I zipped through this one in just two days and truly enjoyed every second of it. Men believed their friendships helped them grow spiritually-they were based on being good to one another, behavior they assumed would bring them closer to God. Women, on the other hand, could never be so virtuous. "Only men were strong enough to maintain a serene, mostly rational, idealistic friendship with another person," Sandidge says. She didn't have any other friends, or want any, which is inconceivable to me.
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