Bffs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship

BFFs shows us that friendships can be the most important, loving, expansive, and emancipatory relationships in our lives—all with the help of our favorite TV, movie, and book besties.

Friendship can be the foundation of our earliest memories and the source of our most formative moments. So why is it often seen as secondary to romantic or familial connection, something we age out of and sacrifice to other relationships? In BFFs, Anahit Behrooz considers female friendship not as something lesser, but as a site of radical intimacy.

From the joys of shared coming-of-age stories and sisterhood, through the pain of break-ups and parting of ways, the vast significance and intensity of feeling within our friendships is explored through depictions in the work of Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Booksmart and Grey's Anatomy, Insecure, The Virgin Suicides and beyond.

Anahit Behrooz is a writer, editor, and journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes extensively on film, literature, and cultural politics for publications including i-D, Little White Lies, AnOther Magazine, gal-dem, The Big Issue, and Girls on Tops. She works as events and books editor at The Skinny magazine and regularly covers festivals such as Venice Film Festival, London Film Festival, and Edinburgh International Book Festival.