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From W be easy Chicago this is Nurdat. I'm Greta Johnson and I don't know

about you but as a single unmarried person living alone during a global pandemic I have been extra grateful for my friends whether they're here in Chicago or in North Carolina or Utah or Oregon or wherever.

I've always had a lot of far-flung friends, which means I'm already used to, you know, sending

postcards and check-ins via text and scheduling phone

calls. Two people who are very good at long-distance friendship are Aminatousso

and Ann Friedman. They have been buds for a solid decade and lost and to call your girlfriend. Anne and Aminatu also wrote a really lovely book recently.

It's called Big Friendship, How We Keep Each Other Close,

and it tells the origin story of their own friendship.

But it's also about how all those important

friendships in your life require just as much effort as any of the other

relationships that you have and how maintaining what they call big friendships isn't always easy but it's almost always worth it.

I mean, too and Anne are with me now. Hey! Hello. Hi.

So I am really interested in the fact that this book opens with the scene where the two of you are like trying

to have a lovely vacation spa weekend, but you are obviously not connecting the way your

friendship normally does. The struggles that you two have had as friends is a huge

part of this story and I wondered like would you ever have considered writing a book about friendship and not including that stuff?

No. Never, truly, never, like truly, truly, truly, never.

I think that, you know, part of why we really wanted to tell

this story specifically in the way that we did, like open

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