Bad Friend with Tiffany Watt Smith
Thu 12 Jun
|The Small City Bookshop
A rebellious new history of female friendship and timely reclamation of the 'bad friend’. Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. Come & celebrate messy female friendship.
Time & Location
12 Jun 2025, 18:45 – 20:30
The Small City Bookshop, 201 Church Rd, Redfield, Bristol BS5 9HL, UK
About the event
These 'bad' friends broke the rules about femininity they didn't write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful.
In this history of women's friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection.
Join us in conversation with Tiffany Watt Smith on her new book on the history of female friendship - told through her own memories of the friendships in her life. This is a celebration of these messy relationships and a chance to throw off the shackles of expectation of what these friendships should be. Will make you want to hug everyone female friend you have.
Will leave you moved, hopeful and inspired in equal measure.' DAISY HAY'
Tiffany Watt Smith takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to Zadie Smith's Swing Time, from prisons to film sets to hospital wards and elder communities, untangling the assumptions about good and bad friends we live by.
Weaving together history, interviews and memoir, Bad Friend offers what's long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.