Happy Galentine's Day!
A celebration of all things female friendship
A short pre(?)-script before we kick off: a stylistic thing, as a reader last week flagged something that might be worth clarifying. Any time I use the title of something, I will italicise it. Where you see something italicised & underlined, clicking that hyperlink will take you somewhere to buy, watch or listen to that title. And now, on with the show:
In case it passed you by, Galentine’s Day takes place on 13 February each year. The pre-Valentine’s celebration was originally conceived in the writers’ room for the completely excellent sitcom Parks & Recreation. In Episode 16 of Season 2, we learn that protagonist & long-term singleton, Leslie Knope, has created this annual tradition to get all her girlfriends together for an evening of fun, friendship and females. Galentine’s has now taken on a life of its own beyond Parks & Rec - and rightly so. Now let’s get on with it…
TL;DR
Read The List of Suspicious Things; watch Booksmart and Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion; listen to Sentimental Garbage and BFF?; and watch We Are Lady Parts.
READ
I have never recommended a book here so soon after reading it. But I adored The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey and it really a wonderful tale of female friendship.
Miv and Sharon are best friends on the cusp of their teenage years. They live in an unspecified town near Leeds in the north of England during the Yorkshire Ripper killings of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Miv eavesdrops on a grown ups’ conversation and winds up terrified that they are going to make her move away from her best friend due to the serial killer on the loose. So, being the plan-hatcher she is, she decides there is only one thing for it: it must fall to them to catch the Ripper.
This book is everywhere at the moment. It was recently Waterstones’ Book of the Month and has been on The Sunday Times’ Bestsellers’ List for a few weeks now - so I’m sure a lot of you have already come across it & if you haven’t, may I recommend you tuck in. Despite owning a toddler, I inhaled it in a mere three sittings and wept at the end.
WATCH
When you search ‘best buddy movies’, Google serves you up fifty titles. Of which, one is about two women. But I’m here to remind the internet that women have buddies too. And there are so many amazing movies about women’s friendships. A few newsletters ago I recommended The First Wives Club - that is definitely one and there are so many more that I had to be really strict with myself to keep this edition to an appropriate length.
First up: Booksmart, in which Amy & Molly are serious, academically-focussed pair of best friends who have reached the end of high school & made it into the Ivy League colleges they were aiming for.
But it transpires all the party-hearty crew from their school have also made into illustrious institutions…and all while having infinitely superior social lives to Amy & Molly. That grinds their gears. So the duo decide they have to mark the end of their time in high school by going to a party…and let’s just say: mayhem ensues. This movie is as the name would suggest smart as well as a great fun with a truly believable, even enviable, female friendship at its core.
And now to one of the most wonderful, yet undersung, pieces of cinema of all time: the 1997 classic Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion. It has long been one of my all-time favourite films.
Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow star in this truly epic voyage through the highs & lows of friendship, school bullies and the weight of the expectations - both of others and ourselves. Janeane Garofalo and Alan Cumming also star and keep a keen eye out for a young Justin Theroux. The fashion is next level, as is the soundtrack and whole script is highly quote-able. Plus there is now a sequel in the works. Get it lined up.
LISTEN
Sticking with the Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, the ingenious Caroline O’Donoghue dedicated an entire episode of her wonderful podcast Sentimental Garbage to the movie.
I only listened to it recently and found the detail of the deep-dive fascinating from the film’s journey to getting made to how much it resonated with both O’Donoghue and her guest Richard Makin in ways that echoed my own joy when I first watched the film more than twenty five years ago.
Going in a different direction: BFF? from Claire Cohen is the partner podcast to Cohen’s 2022 book of BFF? The Truth about Female Friendship.
Across six episodes, Cohen speaks to experts and writers about best friends, work friends and the tricky - but often necessary - art of unfriending. It’s a great exploration of women and their friends that breaks beyond the ‘best friends forever’ narrative we were often fed as youngsters.
WATCH
I recommended The Golden Girls already but I will never not be happy to advise someone to watch it - and to follow the various accounts on social media that regularly post clips from the show. Now that you are aware this Substack will forever and for-always be a Golden Girls stan account, we can move on.
To finish off this week, a show that not enough people I know are talking about: We Are Lady Parts.
Amina is a PhD student and gifted guitarist who can’t perform on stage due to the, er, extreme effects stage fright has on her. And she is supposed to be finding a future husband as well as finishing her studies. Lady Parts is a three-piece all-female Muslim punk band in need of a lead guitarist in order to win the music competition, Sound Smash.
Amina winds up at the audition whilst actually trying to find the aforementioned prospective partner and despite a small amount of ‘stage fright’, she gets the gig. Now they just need to win Sound Smash. What could go wrong?
The songs are great, the vignettes of Amina’s daydreams range from tributes to the Muppets to 1940s wartime movies and the characters are genuinely funny and punchy. All in all it makes for a show unlike anything I’ve seen before and all the more enjoyable for it. Plus: it’s on Channel 4 so you don’t even need a subscription to enjoy it.