Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives

A rewarding, sensible self-help manual for making, keeping and improving friendships, sociologist Yager's how-to takes its title from a word she coined, which refers to the way friendships change as we move through life's stages. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with adults, children, teenagers, workers and executives, she examines the challenges to friendship posed by marriage, divorce, parenthood, job changes and geographic relocation. Yager, whose 10 nonfiction books include Single in America, has distilled a morass of psychological and sociological research, including her own. Among her findings: it takes an average of three years to form a genuine friendship; women, as they advance in the corporate hierarchy, increasingly distrust workplace friendships, whereas men open up and trust these friends more; friendships can be a source of help for dysfunctional families, and for adults who had poor early relationships with parents or siblings. This primer amply supports its central message, that friends are vital to our emotional health. (Jan.)