Toni Morrison shared a forty-plus-year friendship with public speaker, critic, and comedian Fran Lebowitz. Their friendship was instantaneous.
Fran said, “I don’t know how to describe it, but it was like falling in love, except it lasted.”
Toni and Fran loved going to the movies. Standing outside a theater, someone in line behind them said, “I see you two together all the time. Are you related?”
Fran turned her head slowly. Toni was Black, Fran white, twenty years younger, and with signature cropped brown hair and circular glasses.
“Yes,” Fran said. “She’s my son.”
After Toni died, Fran said, “Here’s a thing that most people don’t know about Toni: Toni was one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. And I am an expert on fun.”
The sole argument Toni and Fran had was whether Toni’s apple pie was better than Fran’s mother’s apricot strudel, resolved only after they tasted and compared them both. When Toni won the Nobel Prize, she invited Fran and others with her to Sweden, nicknaming them “Nobelettes,” insisting that Fran stopped by her hotel room immediately after landing, because Toni needed help with her speech and with deciding what gloves to wear.
After Toni died, Fran said, “Here’s a thing that most people don’t know about Toni: Toni was one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. And I am an expert on fun.”Toni adored clothes, Fran explained. Gowns, gloves, all of it. When Toni was hospitalized after her hip replacement, most visitors brought her ruminative literature, like the early twentieth-century French author Marcel Proust—what else for a Nobel Prize winner? Fran, however—to the horror of one visitor from Princeton University, where Toni taught—brought Toni trashy tabloids.
Like Toni, while you might seem serious at work, to your children, or to passersby, with friends, your icy exterior becomes powdered snow that you can play in. You roast friends lovingly, dote on, tease, and celebrate their quirks. You share playlists, new artists, and invite one another on adventures.
While romantic and familial relationships are often exclusive, there are fewer limits with friendship. You can connect with more people from different backgrounds, opposite personalities, and curious tastes. Friends become portals to new, unexpected experiences, splattering fresh colors onto life’s walls. You are a stranger to most in this world, but to your friends, you are you, and that itself is a joy. Joy attracts us to friendship. It is its pull.
Reading about the political friendships mentioned in this book, you might think, my friendships cannot become like them. My friendships are too goofy, and friendships conducive to more demanding dialogue, thinking, and action must require absolute seriousness. You might not feel like a serious, highbrow person. You might not envision yourself like Toni Morrison in some photos, sleeves rolled up, eyebrows scrunched, brainstorming how to disrupt the literary field.
But maybe you can envision yourself like Toni dancing in a nightclub or waiting in line with her friend at the movies. Your conversations’ severity is not an indication of whether your friendships can become more substantial or not. Joy is.
The more your friendships are saturated with joy—the more laughter, inside jokes, silliness, giddy memories and spontaneity—the more qualified you are to wade through life’s more serious sorrows together, too. And the more you will feel compelled to protect joy. Everything you love about friendship, all of its joyousness, is exactly what enables people to not only endure everyday struggles, but larger political ones too.
Good friendship is fun and deep, playful and accountable. We typically do not think of joy and sorrow as interrelated like this. Aristotle’s “friendships of pleasure” frames joy entirely differently. Joy in “friendships of pleasure” have no relation to sorrow, so they remain superficial. Pleasure is unsustainable, unable to withstand the unpleasurable stuff of life. Friends leave as soon as things get hard.
Good friendship reframes pleasure as not only compatible with suffering, the unpleasant stuff in life, but inextricable from it, intimately a part of it.
This does not mean encouraging more sorrow in people’s lives, or adopting a mindset that every good thing has a price, or what goes up must come down. It is instead a reminder that sorrow, inescapable as it is in human life, does not have conflicting interests with joy.
Because good friendships are not only joyous. Maintaining friendship is hard work. Friends suffer from losing loved ones, heartbreak, layoffs, and illness. Caring for friends in a society that values some over others is particularly hard work that forces an awareness of inequities. None of this, however, negates the joy that you can feel.
Geologist Dr. Rainer Newberry coined two types of fun. “Type 1 fun” feels like fun in the moment. “Type 2 fun,” however, might feel grueling in the moment, but it is fun in retrospect. Like a group hike that scabs everyone’s knees, but which you all finished nevertheless, the pride afterward proliferating.
Similarly, friendship’s sorrows do not always disqualify you from its joys. Sorrow does not pronounce you ineligible for joy. Sorrow brings people together, and the more chances to be together like that, raw, hurting, and vulnerable, the more chances for an unbridled, electrifying joy we have too.
When you have friends, you lose friends. When you fight with friends, you appreciate laughing with them more. Joy holds the hand of sorrow to stand upright, and vice versa.
In The Prophet, written in 1923, Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran describes joy and sorrow as comple- mentary: a cup of wine is made in a scolding hot oven; an enchanting musical instrument is carved by a knife’s sharp edge. Sorrow is caused by what once, due to its presence, made you joyful, Gibran says. Joy is caused by what once, due to its absence, made you sorrowful.
You should not feel guilty as you transform your friendships into more serious bonds. Joy is not the opposite of sorrow. Joy rushes in like ocean waves, traveling as deeply as our sorrow’s cavities. You might think, like an overcrowded bus, if sorrow gets on, joy must get off. But joy and sorrow together push out the walls, making room for all of life’s emotions.
In 44 BCE, the Roman statesman Cicero wrote, “For friendship adds a brighter radiance to prosperity and lessens the burden of adversity by dividing and sharing it.” The more adversity is shared, the lighter it feels.
And the more joy is shared, the heavier it feels, in a good way. Friendship buffers our sorrows, and it thickens our joys. A friend’s listening ear lightens the load off you. Texting a friend your vacation photos, she too experiences the joy, amplifying it. We do not have to choose between only fun friendships and serious ones. Friendship reconciles both.
We forget joy and sorrow’s relationship when thinking about activism. Activism is framed as rote, serious work. We use phrases like “fighting for justice,” or “struggling for change.” We see famous activists by a bus window, looking out in silence. Or leading a march, face stern.
We do not have to choose between only fun friendships and serious ones. Friendship reconciles both.When we see these figures as individuals, we forget the joy. When we broaden the frame and see them as friends, the joy is indisputable. Because activists are just people and people, especially during tough times, must laugh a lot with friends.
In a 1989 essay called “The Dance of Revolution,” June Jordan confesses to feeling burnout.
“Every once in a while, it happens. You can’t even predict or block this ugly, overwhelming kind of thing,” she writes. “Suddenly, you’re writhing flat at the absolute bottom of your morale. Nothing important or good seems possible.”
Reading about incessant global tragedies, tired from her own political activism, June felt defeated. She writes that when inundated with sorrow, “‘What is to be done?’ slurs into ‘What difference does it make?'”
You must wait for a surprise, June says, to pick yourself back up. A surprise finally arrived when June’s friends, filmmaker Pratibha Parmar and her partner Shaheen Haq, visited from England.
Pratibha and Shaheen stayed with June in her Brooklyn apartment. As a birthday present to Shaheen, June somehow secured tickets to a sold-out benefit concert, cohosted by Madonna. All three attended, waiting impatiently.
Eventually Madonna and her cohost walked onstage in matching outfits. After sharing facts about murdered rainforests, “to the complete amazement of everyone present,” June writes, “Madonna and Sandra Bernhard then clasped hands, and in each other’s arms, sang….”
June had never seen anything like it in her life. She could not breathe. The London Daily Sun wrote about the event, “The Love Birds…stunned an audience with their lesbian romp.”
June leaped to her feet, clapping with the audience, with her friends, exhilarated. It “astounded and aroused [June’s] sleeping heart.”
Pratibha told me, “June knew both of us were big Madonna fans at the time. We were all so high and couldn’t stop beaming and laughing.”
Every single one of June’s friends I spoke to would look afar, unprompted, and describe June’s laughter: a full-body giggle that peppered most of her words. One friend, writer Ethelbert Miller, said he and June would attend serious political meetings, but would get caught laughing in a corner, passersby shaking their heads, saying, you two are like kids!
Another friend, poet, cultural worker, and educator Kathy Engel, described participating in an intense political event with June, hosted by a congressman. On a walk afterward, June stopped, looked at the hills, and asked, is this a hike? Would this be considered a hike?
“And we all cracked up, it was just so perfect,” Kathy said. “It was like, I don’t know, is it a hike? Having been in this serious, serious place, we’d done this groundbreaking work with the congressman, and then we’re debating whether this is considered a hill, or a mountain, or a hike. We had a lot of moments like that as friends.”
Author and illustrator Alexis De Veaux told me that June would call her, fuming, enraged by something—”I’m gonna kill so-and-so!”—so Alexis would run over to June’s apartment, gradually getting her to laugh about it, calming her down.
Embodied joy is so important to our resistances, Alexis said, because it “releases the steam of multiple oppressive pressures.” It alleviates all the heaviness. It lets us breathe. It makes the fight feel good, not only good, but makes resistance work “the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet,” as author adrienne maree brown says, too.
We never learn about this side of famous friendships, the fun, joyous side, but we must. The more we do, the more we can recognize ourselves in them. You might think your silly friendships cannot possibly be as sophisticated as those rigorous political ones, but they are more than you know.
Admitting that joy is the heartbeat of social movements is what invites us back into them.Friendship remedies even the worst, most sorrowful day. You can spin almost any sadness into an entertaining tale for your friends—that time you lost your passport while traveling, that time you got your heart broken, that time you were robbed. It is perhaps why, in our capitalist economy, happy hours are systematically encouraged after workdays: drinking and socializing with friends helps even the most overworked and underpaid worker return to work the next morning.
Black feminist and theorist bell hooks—who uncapitalized her pen name to minimize individual identity—was good friends with Iranian American scholar and activist Shadee Malaklou. Often, bell would call Dr. Malaklou a “‘prophet of doom,’ someone who thought too critically at the expense of [her] joy.”
Together though, the two friends “laughed, and laughed, and laughed,” Dr. Malaklou writes. “We sifted through boxes of magazines, scouring them for positive images of black, brown, and queer women, and window shopped on Etsy for Turkish rugs. Giggling with bell in the living room, kitchen, and hallways of her home, as she spilled the tea, disabused me of my pessimism.”
Friendship’s joyousness is a rocket flare illuminating the faces around us during those endless nights. Recall a great concert you heard with a friend, or a good meal you shared. Friendship’s joyousness inspires you, reignites you, dissipating your dreariness.
Our ability to laugh with friends, even during the toughest of times, soothes our weariness and simplifies what matters: right now, this, you. Joy is a human spiritual indispensability. Laughter’s radiance recharges us, reenlisting us into the struggle of everyday life. This is why friendship is so feared. This is why capitalism depends on control and disconnection.
Joy gives us something to fight for, not just against. Joy guides us, even if experienced for only a minute, on a hike, talking on the phone with a friend, or passing them on your way to a meeting. When we feel joy through our friendships, we can feel where we lack it, and then we can try changing those areas of lack.
Words like “allyship” and images of social movements often have no lusciousness; in Kathy Engel’s words, “no jazz, delight, or warmth to them.” They are uninviting. Friendship makes resistance tolerable, if not irresistible, through the joy that it spreads. Admitting that joy is the heartbeat of social movements is what invites us back into them.
Civil Rights activist Jo Ann Robinson saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. happiest after he delivered a keynote in Alabama. Unable to attend the dinner-dance afterward, he called the venue.
Someone interrupted Jo Ann, mid-dancing. She walked over to the phone, attached to the dance floor’s wall. Hello? Martin asked if his church members were in attendance. Jo Ann looked around and said yes. He asked if she would hand the phone to them “as they danced by.”
“He was completely happy during that time. I could hear him laughing as he talked, though I did not hold the receiver,” Jo Ann recalls. “It took only little things such as this to make him happy. I attributed his happiness that night to camaraderie: good will and friendship.”
Relationships, whether you call yourself a good friend, activist, organizer, or curator, are the core of movements that effect change. If not for each other, the joyous moments we share, the laughter that makes our bellies ache, then what are we fighting for? If not love, then what else?
What is more, structures of inequity make it so that wealthy white men have the greatest access to joy. Since the world is structured around mass joylessness, if more people felt entitled to experience joy, it would mean restructuring the world—more joy would mean more liberation. Meaning, your joy is not selfish, but actually improves the world. And the surest way for you to feel joy, is through friendship.
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Excerpted from the book Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World by Priya Vulchi. Copyright © 2025 by Priya Vulchi. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
