'Billy No-Mates' by Max Dickens

Max Dickens spoke wittily on Caggie Dunlop’s podcast Saturn Returns about his book that examines the intersections of gender, age, and friendship. Billy No-Mates, despite being subtitled ‘How I Realised Men Have A Friendship Problem’, it is so much more about being a friend than being a man. It brings a taboo subject into the spotlight and looks into the active and passive reasons behind it.

After realising he couldn’t think of someone to be his best man at his wedding, he examined the friendships in his life and realised he was struggling, and that this wasn’t uncommon. His book cleverly examines the cumulative reasons for this.

He humorously dissects gender and the role it plays in friendships – how male friendships often revolve around activities, humour, and ‘shit talking’ , compared to intimate female friendships that are brimming with personal information sharing and vulnerability. As someone who has often found myself envious of the ‘activeness’ of male friendships, sitting and chatting was made even more precious.

He explores the role that toxic masculine stereotypes play in the common surface level-ness of male friendships – the need to crack a joke to perforate social interactions with relief, the awkwardness of seriousness, and the fear of one-to-one ‘dates’ with another man.

Billy No-Mates is a confessional, witty account of how he has, through no deliberate act, become a bad friend, and it is eye-openingly relatable to realise how easy this is. The texts about a catch-up that we don’t reply to for weeks, cancelling plans last minute, reluctance to go to certain events, and neglecting to check in on people, he realises alongside the reader, add up. It is a readable, light-hearted conversation around ageing, youth, romance, and masculinity framed within the context of being and having. Dickens puts in the work – from renting a friend, going to therapy, and visiting a professional hugger, he speculates on a situation that means someone is paying for experiences that should be a free part of being human.

This book inspires looking inwards onto what sort of friends we are and puts into perspective the one-off pints and coffees and walks that are part of the bigger picture of friendship. His witticisms are profound in the way they create meaning in the laughs with friends and the big but little chats about nothing. After reading this book I examined myself as a friend and became deeply thankful for the small interactions around me. It explores friendship as a verb and encourages a reader to practice it deliberately and often.