There's no denying that female friendship is having a moment. In Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship, journalist Kayleen Schaefer explains that the phenomenon owes something to the fact that women are getting married later--they have more time to cultivate friendships before submitting to the demands of family. Another factor: the midcentury march of women into the workplace got them out of the house and exposed to a vast menu of friend possibilities. By the 1980s, television networks recognized that women's friendships had marketing promise, leading to hit shows like The Golden Girls and Designing Women, which parted the waters for gal pal extravaganzas like Sex and the City and, more recently, Girls and Broad City.
Schaefer uses her journalistic chops to cover this and other ground, and to solicit fizzy insights about friendship from female authors, entrepreneurs and entertainers. She also discusses her personal path to female-friendship evangelism, which took a while: hell-bent to succeed in the male-dominated world of magazine writing, the younger Schaefer felt that friendships with women would ghettoize her--"I would have yanked out all of my eyelashes before I'd go to a girls' night." Now she considers her female friends her lifeblood and is wholly committed to the historically new idea that "our friends are not our second choices" over family. The misleadingly titled Text Me When You Get Home is a quick but nutritive read. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and author