Be Be Be My BFF

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend
Rachel Bertsche
Memoir

I expected a flat-out memoir with this book and what I got instead was almost more of a self-help guide. Which is cool, I’m into self-help guides. Ms. Bertsche gives good advice and gets good advice, from quite a variety of sources.

MWF Seeking BFF is about a woman named Rachel Bertsche who ends up moving to Chicago with her husband. Her two bffs stayed behind in New York City and pretty soon, she starts longing for someone to go to brunch with on Sundays and call up any time of day to talk into getting a manicure (maybe it’s just me, but I would never call my best friend out of the blue and ask her if she wanted to get our nails done in thirty minutes. I’m a Virgo, people, I need advanced notice for these kinds of things!) She has plenty of casual friends but not that one special someone. So she starts a quest to go on 50 friend dates in one year and vows to have a new best friend by the time her challenge is over. Does she succeed? That is for me to know and for you to go read the book and find out.

I actually enjoyed this much more than I figured I would. I don’t give friendships much thought and Bertsche cites a lot of statistics and quotes experts about the healing and psychological power of friendship. She’s also really funny, and some of her friend dates end up being hilarious. My only quibble would be that I was also interested in her relationship with her husband, whom she long-distance dated in college. Apparently, he dumped her at one point but they obviously reconciled. I wanted to hear more about that. But then, I’m a romance lover at heart. And nosy.

I did get sick of her whining about not having a bff by the end of the book, however. She came off a little spoiled, especially considering she still had her two best friends back in NYC and she had lots of work friends and other casual friends surrounding her. It was like, geez, lady, get a grip. The fact that you don’t have one superclose, be-all, end-all best friend is not worth getting this worked up about. But I can be impatient sometimes, so maybe that was just me. I think most people would enjoy this, especially those who are looking to widen their social circles.