“Look, I love hearing that. I’m a very needy person,” she says, over a Zoom call from her London home. “And I have to be really careful, because I’m a friendaholic who loves connecting with people.”

Day mentions a well-known celebrity, a recent guest on the How To Fail podcast. She was enamoured of the star, developing something of an instant platonic crush. Figuring this must happen to the celebrity all the time, Day instantly noticed how warm, and yet boundaried, they were. “I’m not equating myself to them at all, but some famous people that I’ve met are so famous and instantly recognisable and everyone wants to have a bit of them. They have to have these boundaries in place. I haven’t quite nailed that yet.”

It got Day thinking about friendship; specifically, how she has launched herself headlong into a number of different types of friendship over the years. Some of them are slow-burns that become ever more enriching, deep and lovely over time. Others are like ill-fated flings — briefly energising and intoxicating, but doomed to burn out.

It’s the bedrock of Day’s eighth book (her third non-fiction one), Friendaholic: Confessions Of A Friendship Addict. In her warmly charming way, Day dissects phenomena like frenemies, White Wine Wednesdays, forging friendships in the online age, and the unpleasantness of ghosting. Day also writes with candour about how her friendships shifted during the pandemic lockdown, the one ‘bestie’ that unceremoniously ditched her, and how seismic life changes can either take a sledgehammer to friendship, or fortify it beyond expectation.

“I was looking at what I was passionate about in my life, in terms of what I wanted to write about next, and I realised that my friends are the most consistent love of my life in so many ways,” Day says. “My friends have seen me through the highest highs and darkest lows, and I wanted to pay tribute to that. But with that degree of love comes intensity. There comes that capacity to wound as well. That’s how you make yourself vulnerable when you fall in love, whether it be platonic, romantic love.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realised I would have to be really honest about some tricky territory in my own personal friendship history. Because when friendships end, part of the issue is that we don’t have sufficiently precise language to describe what [the friendship] is and what we expect from it. We also don’t have the language to reach for when it goes wrong.”

Day is only half-joking when she notes that friends should sort out a contract, so that each party is aware of the nature of the commitment that’s on the table.

“I think we need to be so much more intentional about stepping into a friendship, because a friendship is something that’s so precious,” Day notes. “Part of the issue with why friendships go awry is because we don’t know what it means, and there’s no socially sanctioned sort of friendship ‘dating process’, where you’re like, ‘okay, we’ll go on a second date. We’ll go on a third.’ So sometimes I will rush headlong into something and then I find it hard to retreat from, especially in this age of social media where everyone is easily accessible. And I feel like I’ve done something wrong if I can’t provide the friendship the other person wants.”

Day writes with genuine enthusiasm about her closest friends. She delighted in extensively interviewing many of them for the book. There’s Emma, a psychotherapist who is her main and stay. There’s the straight-talking Sharmaine, who has taught Day how to value herself in other friendships. She also charts her connection with the wise, glamorous and storied Joan, who is two decades her elder. There is also the loveliness of her kinship with her close pal Sathnam (that’s broadcaster/writer Sathnam Sanghera to you and me), whom she met on a quasi-blind date, yet realised quite quickly that they made better friends. Elsewhere, Clemmie is a friend who makes juggling a great family, marriage and stellar career look effortless, until a brain haemorrhage upends her life, reconfiguring her friendship circle along with it.

And yet it’s the friendships that Day admits aren’t up to scratch, and possibly never were, that capture the reader’s imagination. Ali is the sort of frenemy for whom a barbed insult is rarely far from hand, doled out liberally in the name of ‘banter’. Becca literally crosses the street to avoid Day, offering no explanation for her froideur after years of close friendship. Day’s closeness with Maggie is too intense and co-dependent from the off, leaving little room for her to create boundaries. Ella, a long-standing friend, shows a cruel and nasty streak as Day’s career moves in the ascendancy.

Much of the writing about these friends was cathartic, and an attempt on Day’s part to gain an element of clarity about what exactly went wrong with them. It’s unusual to read about the souring of friendships like this, and I ask Day about how she felt writing about these negative experiences, and how she felt about the other party potentially reading them.

“When you write anything that’s informed by memoir or personal experience, it feels incredibly vulnerable, not because of what you’re writing about yourself, but because your story involves your responses to other people,” Day notes. “I was extremely aware that the individuals in question — well, I don’t know if they would read it actually. But I’ve gone to extreme lengths to anonymise. I was protective of their identities, and also, their right to tell their own stories. And I still love so many of the amazing times we spent together, even if we’re no longer an active part in each other’s lives.”

For a woman who has, as she puts herself, made a career out of failure, Day has experienced myriad successes in recent years. With a 250k-strong social media following, Day won the Rising Star Award at the 2019 British Podcast awards. In 2021, her critically acclaimed novel Magpie topped the bestseller charts. That same year, her Devon micro-wedding to Justin Basini (CEO/founder of ClearScore) was covered in British Vogue.

I’m curious to know what this bounty of personal and professional success has done to her friendship circle. As it happens, it has galvanised some friendships, and caused others to ebb away.

“I’ve realised who loves me for who I am, and how important that is for me,” Day says. “I definitely feel I’m much busier than I was five years ago from a work perspective, and it just so happens that the podcast has become one of the most popular things I’ve ever done. That’s been amazing because I feel like I’ve forged too many new friendships with that podcast. I have a shortcut to intimacy — because of the format of How To Fail (where people open up about a perceived ‘failing’ in their lives), we’re going to get vulnerable. Vanessa Feltz, for instance, has become a really good friend. Trinny Woodall is another one. It’s opened up friendships I might not have had otherwise. And I genuinely feel that the listeners are a kind of friend. They know me as I really am.”

Day’s enthusiasm for ‘collecting’ new friends is something that can, in part, be traced back to her Northern-Irish upbringing.

“I just realised that I had this kind of co-dependent relationship with making connections and being liked. It was almost like I didn’t feel I existed unless I had that reassurance from a big group of friends,” she admits. “I wanted to understand where that might have come from for me and, as with everything, you start with your childhood.”

Day’s family moved to Derry from England in 1982 when she was four years old, at a time when bombs and checkpoints were a daily reality. Her father, a surgeon, took a job at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry.

At a time when all that most kids want to do is fit in, Day felt an outsider because of her English accent. She became a listener and a quiet observer — something she describes as a gift for her writing career. She soon found a creative outlet in the Derry Journal, where as a “precocious” 12-year-old, she wrote Pat McArt a spec column about Kylie and Jason, and soon penned pieces on perms, not liking Cliff Richard and the overabundance of Australian soap stars in the charts.

At the time, however, Day’s experience as a weekly boarder pupil in a prestigious private school in Belfast was a negative one.

“I’d been reading all these Mallory Towers books and thought that boarding school sounded glamorous and fun and that there would be midnight feasts,” smiles Day. “The school felt very old-fashioned, with these long communal dormitories with metal-framed creaking beds. We were allowed one bath a week. Honestly, I sound like a Victorian ghost child, but it was ridiculous. It was a shock to the system. Being in the middle of Belfast city in 1990 was also an education in itself.

“I’d never really fitted in because I had this English accent, but when I went to secondary school, the difference became much more apparent because all children of that age want to fit in, and desperately want the safety of the tribe, and so they’re much less forgiving of difference,” Day adds.

“In any case, I was such a geek, wearing corduroy trousers, and I had this very uncool fluorescent orange rucksack,” she adds. “So when I left that school, midway through my third year, my intent at my new school was very much like, ‘okay, I’m going to do things differently this time. I’m never going to feel like that again. I’m going to do whatever it takes to make friends,’ which meant having to shapeshift and change myself.

“That said, I do think [the time spent in Belfast] has a damaging knock-on effect for lots of my friendships, including my romantic relationships where I didn’t really understand who I was in isolation from other people. I think most of it was forged there, absolutely.”

The other aspect of friendship that Day writes movingly about is what happens to female friendship when one person is struggling with infertility and pregnancy loss, as Day herself has, and the other is having babies with relative ease.

“I felt it was really necessary to write about this, because whilst I was going through recurrent miscarriage and unsuccessful fertility treatment, so many of my friends were having children and, even if you don’t want it to, it does place a pressure on a friendship,” Day says.

It can be a conversation between two women that can often be extremely stilted and difficult. “Sometimes we shy away from conversations that we fear are going to be uncomfortable, but also because we don’t want to upset that other person,” Day agrees.

A conversation Day has with her friend Sharmaine, in which the latter reveals that she is pregnant with twins while being mindful of Day’s own experiences, is among the most powerful passages of the book.

“The majority of my friends went into exactly what they had intended to do with their lives, which is having children and starting families, something that I would love to have done,” Day says. “My closest friends always found space for other things and for their friendships with me. But I definitely feel that now those children are getting older, I can not only have my own independent relationships with their children, I also feel like I’m getting so many friends back. I’m not suggesting for a minute that those friends went away or changed, it’s just that [parenthood] takes up so much time and headspace in a way that I can’t possibly hope to begin or understand.”

Many of her friends now come to Day for advice on parenting: “I cannot tell you how touched I feel by that because I think, for a lot of women and men who, for whatever reason, don’t have children, our perspective is dismissed in a society that felt for me, in my thirties, like it was built around the cult of parents. So it’s really nice when people involve us in the discussion.”

Followers of Day’s life and media career will be familiar with her own personal fertility challenges — something that she admits in this book has coloured so much of her life. At 44, she admits she is “sort of letting go of the idea of motherhood right now”.

“I am processing a lot of sadness right now, which I will one day write about,” she says. “But right now, I’m kind of in the thickets. I’ve learned it’s best for me to leave some space for that, and then come back to it. There’s obviously a great deal of sadness and grief attached to that, and yet it’s a different kind of grief, because it’s a grief-ran absence and a life unlived. There are days when I feel that acutely, and then there are days where I’ll feel liberated by having let go of this idea that was very foundational to me for a really long time.”

There’s no doubt that, once Day writes about the experience, it will be as fortifying and as helpful as the conversation she has started around failure in general. In the meantime, Day is working on a novel (“I’m percolating various ideas right now”), and looking at other professional avenues to potentially explore. Up high on her to-do list, she notes, is “working smarter, not harder”.

“Someone said to me the other day, ‘You’d be a good film director,’ and I love that idea,” Day enthuses. “I mean, it’s ludicrous as I have absolutely no experience and it would be quite the career pivot, but I do love film. My adoration of reality TV is well-documented. But I would love to see one of my books adapted for the screen. I’d love to see that through and I’d love to be part of the process. And I’d love to be an extra in one of the scenes. That would be so much fun.”

Friendaholic: Confessions Of A Friendship Addict by Elizabeth Day is out now via 4th Estate books