Female friendships are often stereotyped. There’s the saccharine BFF (Best Friends Forever) types, the pathological ‘Single White Female’ or the dysfunctional pull/push of the bully/doormat (think Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes). However, this wonderful collection takes the time and emotional energy to really explore individual friendships and examine the grey areas in between.

Just Between Us contains 12 works of non-fiction, which I generally enjoyed more than the six fiction pieces. The standout for me was ‘In Broad Daylight’ by Julienne van Loon, which describes her long-term friendship with Jo, a university friend. The story is punctuated with letters between the two that demonstrate their closeness and their understanding of each other’s attempt to find a place in the world. The relationship is complicated by Jo’s schizophrenia and her battle to stay well.

Nikki Gemmell confronts women’s goading of each other, quoting emails sent in response to her newspaper column and describing these vicious put-downs as ‘voices of the dark heart of the female psyche’. She then turns to examine her five-year-old daughter’s friendship with another girl, whose desire seems to be to make Gemmell’s normally vivid and vibrant child self-conscious and unsure.

Some close bonds in the book simply ‘seep away’ with changing times or circumstances. Some writers lament this, while others recognise that the friendships cannot continue. A frequent question arises: could/should I have done more?

Another extremely honest exposition is Liz Byrski’s ‘Friendship – In Several Painful Lessons’. Byrski details three friendships, the earliest at age five, and examines the role she has played in maintaining less than ideal connections. Byrski describes the process of discovering what she requires in a friend as ‘protracted and painful’, and quotes author Alice Walker: ‘No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.’

Annie Condon is is from Readings Hawthorn.