What I Learned About Friendship After Publishing a Book About Friendship

My second book The Life Council: 10 Friends Every Woman Needs turned two years old this spring. I didn’t really see celebrating “book birthdays” as part of the publishing journey, but they are milestones that mark time, and career trajectory, and so here we are. 

Something that happened after the release of both of my books is that six-ish months post-publication, I suffered a mental health crisis. Many author friends have also reported this phenomenon, likening it to the post-partum period after childbirth. It feels like a major vulnerability hangover. It feels like total burnout.  

I never assumed I’d be immune to the post-publication blues, it’s just one of those things you don’t know how to deal with until you’re in the middle of dealing with it. After my first book Share Your Stuff. I’ll Go First. came out, life was in a bit of an upheaval. We moved houses, we were weathering an extended family custody battle, I suffered through some health stuff including a wild reaction to the Covid vaccine and a concussion after a bad fall, and it was all enough to view my book coming out (a lifelong dream!) as a highlight of that year and not one of the things contributing to the spiral of 2021. 

LESSON: You can’t separate your work from your life and the fallout from either thing affects both things. 

Looking back, I see the publication of Share Your Stuff as both a pinnacle of my life and also a massive catalyst for the identity crisis that followed. However, when The Life Council came out just two years later in 2023, I was in a different place. The Life Council had been (mostly) easy to write, and I had less nerves about the publishing process. Most importantly, I thought the topic of The Life Council to be a safe one. I’d been writing and talking about friendship for over a decade at that point. I believed deeply in the concept of a life council and in the friendship philosophies I was espousing. Also the stories in that book were less personal, on the whole. 

And then much of what I wrote about was tested in the months leading up to and following the book’s release. 

Have you ever heard of that curse where if you, say, go on a reality tv show touting your great marriage, then it will soon fall apart? Or if you write a book about thriving in business that you’ll soon go bankrupt? It’s not necessarily about deception, maybe it’s hubris or maybe it’s naivete. It just seems like the way of the universe that you will be tested when you publicly proclaim to know anything about anything. 

I thought the topic of friendship would be immune to that law. I mean, come on! Friendship?! It’s benign as a concept, isn’t it? Mostly? I’ve had friends all my life. Not perfect relationships, but a steady stream of them. Old friends and new, work friends and battle buddies. All types of relationships that I cover in detail in The Life Council, while making the argument of the beauty and necessity of different types of friends. I was even candid about my friendship missteps (which maybe some part of me thought would somehow give me cover?). But even while writing about seasons of loneliness and detachment, friendship just didn’t seem like a dangerous idea to explore.  

LESSON: Trying to cover all your bases will not prepare you for life’s surprises. 

But by the fall of 2023, I was nearly crippled with friendship heartbreak. I felt left behind as my closest friendship group moved on entirely without me. I made a mistake with a friend and wasn’t sure how to fix it, so I didn’t do anything, hurting her even more. I felt left out as two (!!) other friends made big plans and purposefully kept them from me. I was on the receiving end of a text that effectively ended a friendship with someone I loved. These were all different people I’m describing, by the way. All different circumstances, all different relationships. 

It was too much. I was sad and lonely and regretful and confused. I will own my part in the breakdown of some of these friendships, but it didn’t help how hypocritical it felt to my work. The private heartache and the public shame I felt continuing to do press and podcast interviews as a “friendship expert” while I felt like a fraud was paralyzing. I began to turn down some good opportunities because I just couldn’t handle the discrepancy.

I also couldn’t figure out how to feel about any of it. I really loved what I wrote in The Life Council and still believed in its message. I heard continually from people telling me that the life council concept had changed the way they thought about their own friendships and loneliness. I wrestled with the idea that I could never write or talk about anything else that mattered to me, lest the universe teach me these same lessons again, and snatch away what I thought to be true. I was guarded with what I put out on my podcast. While I tended to my heart, my work online became bland and tinged with fear. 

LESSON: It is really hard to show up as your best self when you are heartbroken. 

And then I was shaken out of my stupor overnight. 

It was exactly a year after The Life Council came out that I, in total desperation, asked a long distance friend if we could have a conversation over zoom. This friend wasn’t involved in any of my various friendship drama circles, but she knew the players in the one I was grieving the most. She listened patiently, and I think a little stunned, as I poured out my pain and the shame I felt at not being able to sustain certain friendships after very publicly writing a book about friendship.  

She said all the things that I couldn’t say to myself: that I am a good friend, that having personal friendship struggles didn’t invalidate years worth of work on the power of female friendship, and that holding on to this sadness and shame was making me sick. 

She also reminded me that a core tenet of The Life Council is that most friendships have seasons, that people flow in and out of your life. Having an ebb in friendship when you’ve devoted a book to the topic wasn’t ideal timing (and probably wasn’t a coincidence), but it was also just life.  

She listened to me for hours, God bless her. When we logged off of zoom, the California light out my window was starting to dim. I had to pick up my kids, make dinner, get on with the rest of the day, and I fell into bed exhausted from the unburdening. 

And when I woke up the next morning, I was completely free from the spiral. Like, completely. Light as a feather. The heavy, dull ache I’d been living with was more like an old bruise. 

Of course I didn’t trust it. I decided it was just the euphoria of getting some things off my chest that I hadn’t previously said aloud. 

But as the days and then weeks went by, the hurts were still tender but they didn’t throb. 

LESSON: Sharing your stuff really will change your life. 

(It’s almost like I wrote a whole book about it. Must I keep learning my own lessons over and over again?)

And, though this next part of the journey was slower, it did come: remembering who I am, what the truth is, and that my work is valuable. That piece had gotten lost. 

In the year of navigating some very sticky relationships, I had forgotten my own power. I so badly wanted to make amends or demand understanding in these friendships gone awry. Having published a book complicated all of it. I felt held to a different standard, which may or may not be fair. 

But I couldn’t stay in this place. The hours long zoom call with my friend had been an emptying and I was ready to replenish.  

Look, sometimes all you can do is offer or receive an apology and then move on. Wallowing in your own mistakes or wasting time wishing someone else had acted differently will only lead to a gray-ing out of yourself. 

This clarity arrived overnight but it still took a minute to see the world through this lens. 

LESSON: Clarity happens all at once after a long time of waiting on its arrival. 

I have wonderful friends and I am a good friend. My writing and speaking about friendship is real and true. 

I still don’t understand the law of the universe that makes things like this happen, but I think it has something to do with teaching you what you’re teaching others. I see this now as part of my own friendship journey which, by the nature of what I do, is also tied to my art and career. I am meant to write about my life and what I’m learning and this was a high stakes, hard way to learn how I want to show up in my relationships and in my work and how to do it better next time. 

I’d like to say that I made some mistakes I’ll never make again, which I hope to be true, but is probably unlikely. When you choose to write about your life, there are going to be complications. And I plan to keep writing about my life. 

LESSON: When you figure out what you’re put on this earth to do, don’t stop doing it when things get hard. 

The Life Council: 10 Friends Every Woman Needs is a book that I’m proud of. I am less proud of the year that followed its release, but with the gift of some distance, I know it was all leading somewhere. 

Here, maybe? 

Here. 

Thanks for reading the Secret Posts.