In “Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World,” Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents and identities, showing how friendship can not only bring joy and community, but also awaken change. A doctoral candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Vulchi reveals the importance friendships have had in shaping our past and what they can do for our future. “Good Friends” came out April 8, and Vulchi speaks Monday at Harvard Book Store. We interviewed her Thursday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in friendship as a topic?
When I was around 15, I started a racial literacy nonprofit called Choose with my friend Winona Guo. We co-authored a racial literacy textbook, and then we deferred college and traveled to all 50 states to interview people about race. Those stories were featured in our last racial literacy book “Tell Me Who You Are.” Our friendship, which opened up a gateway to other friendships, had a very central role in my life. Even as Winona and I separated to go to different colleges, we started calling each other platonic life partners. I realized as you get older, you’re made to feel very weird for keeping friends close. For many of us, romantic partners are the main dish, and friendships are the side dishes. I became curious about why that is and what kind of effect that has on our lives, and I was particularly interested in the political repercussions of moving through life while losing ties to your friends and becoming more individualistic.
Tell me more about those repercussions in terms of our current political moment.
We know that loneliness is really bad for your health; studies show it’s as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So that feeds into the political climate, because if you think about it simply, the more alone you are, the more politically vulnerable you are and the more politically vulnerable other people are. I’m a grad student at Harvard, and there’s mass censorship happening right now. Students are being abducted by Ice: Rümeysa Öztürk was taken by Ice very close to where I live in Somerville. There can be an instinct to kind of bury your head in the sand and close the door and be alone when things like this happen. When we think about how social change happens, we have this false idea that past social change has happened because of these individual solo icons, like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. But actually, that’s a revisionist history. In reality, social change happened through friendships and through organizing and through community. Martin Luther King had Ralph Abernathy, for instance, and Rosa Parks had her friend Johnnie Carr, but we don’t know these other names. It’s not out of the norm, it’s actually what has always happened to affect change.
Was there a particular figure or friendship guiding your research?
The book comes most prominently out of African American studies. I was an undergraduate at Princeton in the African American Studies department when I first started taking friendships seriously as something to study, and the person who guided my research is a woman named June Jordan. She was a Black feminist, poet, activist, organizer and educator who passed away in 2002. When I graduated from undergrad, I moved to San Francisco because there are a lot of people who knew her directly in the Bay Area. I wanted to get in touch with them to do more research, because I think June Jordan is someone everyone should know. She’s not as well-known as her contemporaries, people like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, because she was censored, in part for writing about Palestine. But she was just a remarkable friend, and she took her friendships very seriously. Her friendships made up a sort of petri dish, a way for her to grow her politics, as well as her courage, her joy, her laughter, and that then transcended her friendships. She showed me that in our highly individualistic world, we can’t develop the political muscles to care about strangers if we can’t even care about our friends.
How do you see friendships and our outlook on friendship having changed over time?
There are differences and similarities. Going way back to Plato, I’m paraphrasing, but he wrote that it makes sense for the Persian Empire – those in power – to not want bonds of friendship between people. So this sentiment was common then too. The more together we are outside our nuclear families and our very individualistic lives, the stronger we are, and that has taken on a very particular and more exaggerated effect now that we’re living in capitalism. I write about this in the book, citing Amelia Montooth, but back in the day, if you wanted to get a dress for an event, you would ask a friend to borrow one. If you needed some sugar, you might have asked a neighbor. If you needed a ride to the airport, you might have asked a friend. Today, if you need a dress you can order it on Amazon, if you need sugar you can get it from Postmates, if you need a ride to the airport you can call an Uber. Systemically it’s become very inconvenient to have a friend. We don’t realize that using all those apps and leaning into capitalism in that way is good for nobody except, as Amelia Montooth says, for these companies that make a lot of money. We feel very nervous about asking friends for very basic favors, but this sort of “small-favor economy” resists capitalist overconsumption and creates quality time between friends, which is really important. That’s just one way in which we are by design atomized and torn apart from one another.
What would you recommend to people who want to prioritize and invest in their friendships?
We have to address a failure of imagination. Going back to the social justice icons we learned about in school, having learned about them as individuals in a vacuum, I felt so weird having my friend Winona with me when we were doing this racial literacy organizing. I felt like I was doing something wrong, because for many of us, we don’t even know that friends can be this way in our life. Stories about friendship are very absent in our popular media. If you think about it, it’s really only in fictional children’s TV shows or movies, like “Avatar: The Last Airbender” or “Harry Potter” where you see robust friendships changing the world. In real life, we think that’s incorrect and doesn’t happen, so part of it is first opening up your brain to the prospect that friendship could be the greatest love story you experience. And similarly, that friends not only can be but should be just as important as any other person who’s biologically or legally fastened to you. The book is not just theory, it’s also praxis, because I wrote this book in the lineage of African American studies. I wrote about James Baldwin’s friendship with Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King’s friendships, June Jordan, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou. You see how friendship is good, bad, messy, complicated. You’re going to make mistakes, it’s improvisational, there are no templates. Nobody teaches us how to be a good friend, but there are a series of things that we can learn from the people who actually have done it. I’m not reinventing the wheel, and “Good Friends” tries to show that.
Priya Vulchi reads from “Good Friends” at 7 p.m. Monday at Harvard Book Store,1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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