Good Friends

Bonds That Change Us and the World

Coming Soon

Contributors

By Priya Vulchi

Formats and Prices

Price

$29.00

Price

$38.00 CAD

FRIENDSHIP IS THE GREAT LOVE STORY WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.

Friendship is good for your health.

Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Still, we are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life.

What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Through her inspiring and impassioned prose, Vulchi entirely reimagines our platonic ties, revealing that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of love and resistance.

Intimate and engaging, Good Friends offers a resounding cry that friendship is not only vital for our own individual well-being, but for humanity itself. It invites you to be inspired not just by what people do but how people love. It invites you to look at your friends differently and enter a dazzlingly fresh philosophy of human connection.

 

  • "Priya Vulchi is both a genius and a gem. Good Friends is a beautifully composed lesson in virtue and a thoughtful journey through tender intimacies. At the crossroads of memoir and philosophy, Good Friends will leave you with a deeper appreciation for friendship and immense gratitude for good friends."
    Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of South to America
  • "Drawing on sources from Aristotle to June Jordan, Priya Vulchi is doing the essential, corrective work of giving our social bonds their intellectual due. Simultaneously intimate and expansive in its curiosities, Good Friends persuasively repositions friendship as an essential force that has shaped art, history, politics and our lives."
    Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies
  • Good Friends is a beautiful book. Intimate and delicate—an extraordinary testimony to the power and ethical demand of friendship. There is so much to learn on every page. Vulchi has given us a gift, and I am thankful for it.”
    Eddie S. Glaude, New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again
  • "Poignant, poetic, and breathtaking! Priya Vulchi’s words probe delicately but insistently into the part of our hearts where we’ve relegated friendships to afterthoughts and mere entertainment. She guides them back to the center of our lives, where their true significance can shape us. Just a few pages in, I became that annoying friend blowing up the group chat, quoting passages and urging everyone to grab a copy of Good Friends."
    Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice

On Sale
Apr 8, 2025
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Legacy Lit
ISBN-13
9781538766620

Priya Vulchi

About the Author

Priya Vulchi is the co-author of Tell Me Who You Are and was the co-founder of the non-profit CHOOSE, which she ran with her friend for over a decade. Vulchi was the youngest TED Resident ever, one of Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 Young People Changing the World, and one of Bitch Media’s Fifty Most Influential feminists. Her work has been featured in the The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Scholastic, Bustle, BBC, and more. She has a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in African American Studies and Cognitive Science. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar.

Learn more about this author