Psychiatrist Dobransky applies the formulaic approach of his first book, The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love,
to a subject of which he can have no firsthand knowledge: why women need friends for health and happiness. Using the pedestrian prose of his coauthor, Dobransky shares what he calls “the secret code of friendship”: consistent, mutual, shared positive emotion. The author continues to state the obvious when he says that negative emotion and stress are friendship killers, and he advises his readers to build up their internal self-esteem so that they won’t appear needy to others. Dobransky’s basic thesis—that women need to make friends in order to belong—is equally simplistic, and a more nuanced version has been expressed elsewhere, such as in Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand
, a source that Dobransky refers to but doesn’t include in his bibliography. The repetitive and overcomplicated diagrams that appear on almost every page add little to the author’s message. (May)
