The problem with female FRIENDS

They can be your biggest support or a total pain, as Claire Cohen has discovered

It was the messages that did it. They started a week or two before my 39th birthday, when friends began sending semi-joking WhatsApps asking, 'Err, are you having a party and haven't invited me or something?'

I could understand their paranoia. Lockdowns aside, I have always had a celebration to mark my birthday, whether pints at the local pub or a kitchen disco, with homemade cocktails. Until this year.

Something had changed and as my birthday approached, I found myself backing away from the idea of doing anything or seeing anyone other than my husband and cat. I didn't want to socialise and the problem was - I realised with horror - my friends.

Dishing the dirt

You see, last summer I put them all in my book about female friendship, an honest account of what I believe to be the defining relationships of women's lives. I wanted to undo the stereotypes, so often portrayed in popular culture, of female friends being perfect best friends for ever or catfighting enemies. And that meant dishing the dirt on my friends, the highs and lows that any woman would recognise but that few, quite sensibly, would commit to paper for thousands of people to pore over.

There's nothing that can prepare you for having your real-life female friends read the words you have written about them. The feeling that, despite asking their permission to use their names or a gentle heads-up that you're telling a certain anecdote, they will now know what has been living in your head all these years. It's the most confronting thing I've ever done and there have been moments when I've wondered whether I shouldn't have stirred the hornet's nest.