Good Friends, Priya Vulchi
Good Friends, Priya Vulchi
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Good Friends
Bonds That Change Us and the World

Author: Priya Vulchi

Narrator: Heni Zoutomou

Unabridged: 4 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Legacy Lit

Published: 04/08/2025


Synopsis

From the co-author of Tell Me Who You Are and a TED speaker, a book that reveals the importance of friendship as a tool of social justice.

Friendship is good for your health. Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Still, we are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world. 

Through her inspiring and impassioned prose, Vulchi entirely reimagines our platonic ties, revealing that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of love and resistance. Intimate and engaging, Good Friends offers a resounding cry that friendship is not only vital for our own individual well-being, but for humanity itself. It invites you to be inspired not just by what people do but how people love. It invites you to look at your friends differently and enter a dazzlingly fresh philosophy of human connection.  

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ezra on April 21, 2025

Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World is somewhere between a self-help book and a history book, but there isn’t enough of either part to make it fully satisfying. It doesn’t have clear organization, which makes it difficult to see how the information fits together and thus makes it hard t......more

Goodreads review by lexactuallyreads on April 11, 2025

Friendship is the greatest love story we've been looking for. Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World by Priya Vulchi "Friendship is not a secondary peripheral relationship in our lives. Friendship is the standard, the aspiration." Thank you to Netgalley, Priya Vulchi, Hachette Audio and L......more

Goodreads review by Julie on February 15, 2025

This is a call for us to reconsider the importance of friendship in our lives, and to elevate it to the status we currently only seem to afford to romantic relationships. I'm all for that. I also applaud the author for centering various Black friendships---mostly among Black intellectuals of the 20th......more

Goodreads review by Heather Melanie on February 26, 2025

Good Friends by Priya Vulchi offers an insightful exploration of friendship, but it doesn’t quite deliver on the promise suggested by the description. Instead of a traditional narrative about the dynamics of friendship, the book leans heavily on quotes and reflections, offering a lot of explanation......more

Goodreads review by aj on March 21, 2025

I really wanted to love this book, but it feels mismarketed. Friendship is an important subject to me that I genuinely wanted to read deeply about. It’s a pity then that the bulk of the book instead felt like one drawn out senior thesis about June Jordan — who is, by the way, an extraordinary figure......more


Quotes

"Priya Vulchi is both a genius and a gem. Good Friends is a beautifully composed lesson in virtue and a thoughtful journey through tender intimacies. At the crossroads of memoir and philosophy, Good Friends will leave you with a deeper appreciation for friendship and immense gratitude for good friends."—Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of South to America

"Drawing on sources from Aristotle to June Jordan, Priya Vulchi is doing the essential, corrective work of giving our social bonds their intellectual due. Simultaneously intimate and expansive in its curiosities, Good Friends persuasively repositions friendship as an essential force that has shaped art, history, politics and our lives."—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies

Good Friends is a beautiful book. Intimate and delicate—an extraordinary testimony to the power and ethical demand of friendship. There is so much to learn on every page. Vulchi has given us a gift, and I am thankful for it.”—Eddie S. Glaude, New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again

"Poignant, poetic, and breathtaking! Priya Vulchi’s words probe delicately but insistently into the part of our hearts where we’ve relegated friendships to afterthoughts and mere entertainment. She guides them back to the center of our lives, where their true significance can shape us. Just a few pages in, I became that annoying friend blowing up the group chat, quoting passages and urging everyone to grab a copy of Good Friends."—Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice