We, humans, are social animals. So, you’d think that being sociable would come easily to us. However, that’s often not the case. Even if we don’t go into the various special cases or conditions that can make befriending people more difficult, many of us just have trouble socializing most of the time. Even just being an introvert who works from home can make befriending people a bit too difficult.
Fortunately, there’s also a lot of information that has been discovered and written on the topic – both in fiction and non-fiction. So, if you’re looking for some insight into the art of making friends or an inspiring book about friendships, here are our 16 best suggestions:
9 Best Non-Fiction Books about Friendship
Psychologists and psychoanalysts have been writing about the ability to make friends and establish meaningful human connections for decades and centuries. There are numerous books on the topic, but if we had to start somewhere, we’d suggest the following 9 examples:
1. How to be a Best Friend Forever: Making and Keeping Lifetime Relationships by John Townsend
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In How to be a Best Friend Forever: Making and Keeping Lifetime Relationships, Dr. Townsend explores the peculiar nature of adult friendships, why they’re more difficult to make and maintain than friendships in the earlier years of our lives, and how to fix that.
Quick Review:
Making friends is one of the few skills which people seem to get worse at the more they practice it. There are many factors that play into this and Dr. John Townsend’s book is an excellent guide full of tips, recommendations, and example stories to help us in our quest to re-establish stable, lasting, and fulfilling friendships and relationships in our adult life.
2. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
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Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead is a fantastic exploration of why making meaningful friendships is so difficult not just for adults in general but even more so for people who have trouble being vulnerable with others.
Quick Review:
When talking about making friends, it’s important to note that not all friendships are the same. Having friends to go watch a game or have a drink with at the weekend is great but when authors and psychologists talk about friendships they talk about the type of connection that’s truly meaningful, a connection with someone you can be vulnerable with.
This is exactly what Brené Brown explores in her book, as well as why some people have more trouble showing their vulnerabilities than others, how this affects their lives, how to change it, and more.
3. Friendship in the Age of Loneliness: An Optimist’s Guide to Connection by Adam Smiley Poswolsky
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Adam Poswolsky’s Friendship in the Age of Loneliness: An Optimist’s Guide to Connection is one of the most topical books about friendships today, in a post-pandemic age of people working from home and spending most of their time with their “online friends” rather than in person.
Quick Review:
The topic of how the internet has affected people’s social lives has been widely discussed for more than two decades but the 2020 pandemic really kicked it into high gear with the subsequent quarantine periods and the mass transition to home office life.
With Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, Poswolsky examines exactly how people can subvert the effects of this increased isolation, and how to still manage to build meaningful connections and relationships that give us the comradery we need and that can last for a lifetime.
4. Here to Make Friends by Hope Kelaher LCSW
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If the title Here to Make Friends: How to Make Friends as an Adult: Advice to Help You Expand Your Social Circle, Nurture Meaningful Relationships, and Build a Healthier, Happier Social Life feels like it covers a lot of ground, you’d be surprised of how extensive and all-encompassing Kelaher’s whole book is.
Quick Review:
In contrast to the above titles, Hope Kelaher’s book focuses more on the countless minor practicalities that come into play when trying to make friends. As such, Here to Make Friends is a great field guide full of many tips and tricks that can help you get past the first hurdles of human interaction such as breaking the ice, showing interest, expressing yourself, and more.
5. The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults by Elizabeth Laugeson
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Making friends can be seen as science as much as art. Laugeson’s The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults looks at it as the former and especially through the lens of kids and young adults.
Quick Review:
Laugeson has written The Science of Making Friends specifically for the parents of children with conditions such as ADHD, autism, and others. The book expertly outlines numerous great plans and strategies for helping teens get through the hardships of socialization as easily, smoothly, and effectively as possible. As such, it’s one of the best guides for parents that have found themselves in a situation they don’t know how to deal with but want to help their kids with as much as possible.
6. Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow
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The main focus of Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow isn’t making friends – it’s keeping them in the face of an onslaught of adult responsibilities and distractions.
Quick Review:
Sow has written one of the best books for adults who are distressed about moving further and further apart from most of their friends. The book fully acknowledges the reality of how work, kids, diverging interests, and even politics often push years-long friends away from each other and then offers lots of invaluable advice and insight into how to counteract that process and keep your friends close.
7. That Sounds Fun: The Joys of Being an Amateur, the Power of Falling in Love, and Why You Need a Hobby by Annie F. Downs
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That Sounds Fun: The Joys of Being an Amateur, the Power of Falling in Love, and Why You Need a Hobby doesn’t look at friendships directly but indirectly. Instead, it focuses on the question of finding hobbies and finding joy in life – exactly the things that are the perfect gateways to finding true and fulfilling friendships.
Quick Review:
Annie F. Downs’ book is one of the best guides for people, young or old, who are feeling a bit lost in life, without lots of friends around, and with little to no captivating hobbies to keep the occupies. The book lays down lots of fantastic tips and insights into the power of hobbies, and how to pinpoint the best hobbies for you. From there, the next step of finding like-minded people who share your interests almost always happens on its own.
8. We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends by Billy Baker
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We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends is a fantastic memoir of a man who faced and overcame the same challenge most of us struggle with – losing your friends as you grow up.
Quick Review:
Billy Baker’s book is a memoir detailing how he realized he’s lost most of his friends to time, work, family life, and more, and how all that affected not just his overall life satisfaction but even his mental health. With this memoir, however, he also offers a great dose of know-how and advice on overcoming these hurdles and reconnecting with your friends before it’s too late.
9. I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) by Brené Brown
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Brown’s other landmark work, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”, is just as much of a poignant and insightful look into embracing yourself and opening up to the world.
Quick Review:
Accepting others, letting them get close to you, allowing them to get to know you – all of these can be difficult and even emotionally painful feats that we’re usually not capable of if we haven’t gotten to a certain point of self-acceptance.
With I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), Brown drives home the point that self-acceptance is one of the key problems many people have when they find themselves unable to make friends. And Brown addresses this problem expertly in her book.
7 Best Novels about the Power of Friendship
A book doesn’t need to be a deep psychoanalytical research document to inspire and offer lessons. There are plenty of great novels, fictionalized memoirs, and other stories that can teach us a lot about the power of friendships and what makes them work.
1. Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love by Kim Fay
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Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love is the captivating story of two women from entirely different generations and parts of the US connecting through food.
Quick Review:
In an era of daily long-distance communication, a story about two people communicating from afar about a hobby they love is as topical as anything can be. Fay’s book tells the story of 59-year-old Imogen and 27-year-old Joan connecting via magazine fan mail about their favorite topic – clam saffron recipes. Lighthearted, exhilarating, and a breeze to read, Love and Saffron is great for anyone looking for a great read about friendships.
2. The Friendship List by Susan Mallery
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As the cover of The Friendship List shows, this is a perfect beach read for anyone wanting something interesting and fun about friendships.
Quick Review:
In this book, Susan Mallery tells the story of Ellen – a single mom who embarks on a journey to re-learn how to live her best life. The Friendship List is full of fun and memorable shenanigans between friends, numerous lightly-presented but thought-provoking insights, and lots of heart.
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings hardly needs an introduction. It’s a story about many other things too – sacrifice, bravery, and the immeasurable significance of selflessness. Yet, there’s a reason why the first book of the trilogy has Fellowship in the title.
Quick Review:
As with any great fantasy, The Lord of the Rings’ strength is in dissecting the basic emotions and experiences every person goes through – the ones that are at the very core of our humanity. Friendship is not only one such experience but it’s arguably the beating heart of the story.
Sam’s devotion to Frodo, Mary, and Pippin’s friendship, as well as the trio of Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli – every storyline in the trilogy, is centered around rapidly developing friendships that drive the characters forward through every challenge.
4. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
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Even though Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower came out in the 90s, it’s fair to say that it’s become a classic by now.
Quick Review:
A dramatic, dynamic, and heartwarming story about friendship and teenage trauma, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an endlessly relatable YA book that will likely become timeless given how well Chbosky manages to capture the spirit of people’s teenage years and the importance of inclusivity and acceptance.
5. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
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A Man Called Ove is a fantastic and humorous exploration of the journey that is looking for friendships in unlikely places.
Quick Review:
Backman’s A Man Called Ove is another book on this list that got a movie adaptation, this time with Tom Hank’s A Man Called Otto in 2023. As with the other titles here, this was more than deserved as Backman’s novel is phenomenal at demonstrating the importance of finding and forming connections even when we don’t feel like it.
6. The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
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A Newberry Award winner in 2013, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate may be a children’s book but it’s one of the most life-changing books about friendship you can find in any bookstore.
Quick Review:
A story of a silverback gorilla living in captivity in a mall, of all places, The One and Only Ivan explores Ivan’s newfound friendship with an aging elephant – a fellow performer in the mall. Touching and heartwarming, Applegate’s book can seem simple at face value but is one of the best books about connections, friendships, and hope out there.
7. A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead
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A historical novel based on real-life events during WWII, A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead is equal parts heartwrenching and heartwarming.
Quick Review:
The Second World War is one of those events that tested the very limits of people’s willpower, strength, and unity. Moorehead’s book is a story based on the interviews and real-life stories of 230 women imprisoned by the Gestapo for “espionage”, about the friendships and bonds they formed, and about how those connections managed to get many of them to what seemed impossible for the longest time – survival.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, with so many examples, we’ve suggested at least a few books you haven’t read yet. If not, there certainly are lots of other great books on this subject to look into.
The topic of friendships and comradery can be seen as “simple” from certain points of view but it’s also quintessential for the human experience which is why it’s been ever-present in humanity’s literature and arts for thousands of years.
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