Toxic Friends/true Friends: How Your Friends Can Make Or Break Your Health, Happiness, Family, And Career [Hardcover]

Florence Isaacs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1999

We expect friendships to be free of the static that frazzles many family relationships, and often we fail to see how deeply friendships shape our lives, work, and well-being. So much remains unspoken that when conflicts arise, they surprise, shock, even shatter us.

Florence Isaacs explores the complex interplay of affection, obligation, and competition in women's friendships and shows how these dynamics emerge between close, casual, or collegial friends confronting life's ups and downs ( career demands, single life, marriage, divorce, retirement, and more. Isaacs explains:

Who's a real friend and who's a waste of time or worse.

How to make lasting personal and professional friends and avoid people who hurt you through jealousy, manipulation, or self-centeredness.

How to navigate tricky waters ( friendships online, with in-laws, and with the opposite sex.

How the right friends can improve single life, marriage, and make you a better parent.

True friends are worth their weight in gold; toxic friends threaten your well-being. This book reveals how to tell the difference.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Most women will have figured this out for themselves by age 30, but for those needing help, here are reasonable parameters for defining friendship, when it's a good thing, and when it goes bad. Isaacs (Just a Note to Say: The Perfect Words for Every Occasion and Business Notes) cites research findings to instruct us that friendship involves such elements as ``mutual trust, respect, understanding, affection, compatibility, acceptance, and affirmation''; and she delineates three categories of relationships: best, good, and casual. Among the predictable sources of friction cited here are the tension between dependence and independence, unrealistic expectations, envy, rushing the friendship, and ``poor friendship choices.'' The rest of this guide looks at particular circumstances: friendships on the job (those between peers have, not surprisingly, the best chance of success) and how friends affect marriage, parenting, singlehood, family life, health, and retirement. Isaacs has researched her subject, and her case stories are entertaining, but readers of women's magazines especially will find this mighty familiar ground. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Florence Isaacs is the author of Just a Note to Say: The Perfect Words for Every Occasion and Business Notes. Her articles have appeared in Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Reader's Digest and Parade. She lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (February 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688154425
• ISBN-13: 978-0688154424
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #484,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful but not very enlightening, July 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Toxic Friends/true Friends: How Your Friends Can Make Or Break Your Health, Happiness, Family, And Career (Hardcover)

I admit to having a vested interest in this book -- I was one of the women interviewed for it. Nonetheless, I found it disappointing. Isaacs' use of "true stories" gives the book solidity, it's well written, and she makes some excellent points about the significance of friendship in women's lives. On the other hand, her discussion is often superficial: e.g., she says she heard all sorts of heartbreaking stories from women who'd been hurt by a friend's betrayal, but then she gives a couple of lame examples and drifts off into vague generalities. I think the book would have been much stronger if she had used MORE examples: a memorable story is a better "lesson" than someone's theorizing about it. Also, she seems to blithely assume that the best response to a "toxic" friendship is to cut that person out of your life completely, but it's often not that simple. (I have one long-term friend, of 30+ years' standing, who I keep in touch with because I feel I'm one of the few sane, normal people in her life -- but I've minimized our contacts to protect my own sanity!) I think that the "life stages" organization the author chose for the book limited her unnecessarily: she couldn't go into depth about more "general" issues because she felt constrained to cover the same "issues/problems/solutions" territory in each chapter. This isn't a bad book by any standard -- I found it a useful summary of the subject -- but, compared to what it could have been, I found it a big letdown.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Description of Bad Friendships, But No "Tools", July 5, 2000

By 

Helene Hoffman (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Toxic Friends/true Friends: How Your Friends Can Make Or Break Your Health, Happiness, Family, And Career (Hardcover)

I agree with the first customer review -there are many, many more "toxic friends" than people think. With that said, I thought the book is a fine overview of an important subject. However, the author should have given more discussion and suggestions on how to end a toxic friendship. I have had to do this recently, and it is very emotionally difficult. But I have used tools that I have learned over the years such as: writing "anger letters" to the person, which you never send; writing "farewell letters" to the person, also which you may choose to never send. I have learned to cry about the loss, and let go. Very importantly, I try, in every single case, to learn the important lesson: what went wrong, and how should I have done things differently. Unfortunately, the author spends very little to no time on these topics.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars enlightening, in-depth info on effects of friendship, March 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Toxic Friends/true Friends: How Your Friends Can Make Or Break Your Health, Happiness, Family, And Career (Hardcover)

Most people might think "relationships are difficult, friends are easy" but such is not always the case. "Toxic Friends, True Friends" is an in-depth discussion of the far-reaching effects friends have on our lives--both good and bad--and what to do about insidiously toxic friendships that may on the surface appear to be normal and healthy. Every woman I've mentioned this book to has wanted to read it; apparently toxic friendships are more common than is generally thought, and the need for healthy friends is a lifelong matter. Married or not, people who don't happen to belong to naturally-occurring job, church, or school groups are as serious about needing and seeking out new friends as they are/were about finding a mate. In general, the book goes way beyond women's magazine platitudes--I'm a psychotherapist, and found "Toxic Friends, True Friends" enlightening on many levels. Good discussion of developing and maintaining on-line friendships as well.