Capsule #91 ft. The Read Room

Hello hello,

I’m keen to get a few more responses to the Capsule survey to see how you’re finding the newsletter. It’s short and very helpful for me - thank you 🫶.

With the start of spring and the busier calendar months, this week’s issue is all about friendship. I think it’s good to take a second to reflect on it before our diaries are stacked! On the topic of friendship, I’m delighted to have Kya Buller and Sophia Wild on this week’s Hot & Not — two BFFs who have just started a book club called The Read Room together.

Enjoy!

Holly x

It’s that time of year: spring officially started, our calendars are filling up, and all of the stuff we talk about doing is finally coming to fruition. WhatsApp groups for parties, attempts to coordinate the whole group for a belated dinner, weekends away to celebrate milestones. This is gorgeous, obviously, but it also draws out some issues around contemporary friendship that many of us haven’t quite cracked:

1. Sometimes keeping up with people feels more akin to work or admin

2. We want plans to look forward to but making them excessively removes space for spontaneity

3. It can feel like everyone is having a lot of fun while you’re struggling

I think it’s worth thinking about these before we get into the best few months of the year. And over the past 12 months or so, I’ve saved a bunch of good writing on friendship that can help us navigate the feelings that may pop up.

In her newsletter bookbear express, Ava (cannot find her surname!) writes about the huge impact our friends have on us: “in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.” This has played a massively positive role in her life; her friends’ optimistic view of life and work ultimately encouraged her to pursue writing full-time even when she didn’t feel good enough. They helped her become who she wanted to be deep down, fundamentally changing the shape of her life. On realising this, Ava created the “friendship theory of everything,” which is composed of the following tenets:

Ava emphasises the important of consistent, in-person connection, and shamelessly admitting to yourself (and your friends) that they are a fundamental part of your life. There is a lot of joy and community to be gained from this, but also hardship: “there is no such thing as closeness without friction.” The way she describes friendship reminds me a lot of how my close relationships have grown to feel in my late twenties — less like a herd of people together by chance, rallying themselves towards the next event, and more like a cast of people committed to showing up for the good stuff, the boring stuff, and the Really Hard bits. This is probably a shift that comes with time; over the past five years, for the lack of a better phrase, shit has hit the fan. Family conflict, job losses, and mental health crisis moments have meant that friendships haven’t just been a mechanism for having fun and keeping busy, but a crucial part of learning how to deal with downturns, and feeling safe and supported whilst doing so. They feel more real and more textured - the same way life does when you’ve lived more of it.

In mapping my own experience onto Ava’s friendship theory, it felt like a distinctly “twenties” proposal — this period in our lives with more time and space to properly nurture these relationships and grow with them. Close and frequent proximity to your friends is something we see figured on TV all the time - Sex and The City, Girls, Friends - and we’re trying to mimic that for ourselves. We want what they have, our cups of companionship brimming to the top, so full that they’ll never run dry. But what happens when dynamics shift? What if we had less time?

In her essay “Reaching no-plan nirvana,” Haley Nahman talks about the power of spontaneity when it comes to seeing friends now that she’s a mother. Unexpected blank space in her diary, preserved for baby-related contingencies, gave way to last minute opportunity: “Spontaneous texts telling friends I was heading to the park if they wanted to join; playdate requests with two-hour warnings; last-minute suggestions to get dinner the next night or breakfast the next morning.” All these offers had a surprising uptake within her circle of other typically busy people.

This is a stark contrast to the way in which friendships played out in her life before kids:

I think this is something we can all relate to: declining a plan because it falls the day before an early start, or on the flip slide, forcing yourself to show up to a Sunday coffee even though you feel drained, for fear of falling out of favour with people. I talk about this a lot with my best friend, who is one of those people who has so many close friends that it’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing to be loved by so many people, of course, but a curse to constantly feel like you’re letting someone down. At the start of this year, this friend chose a word through which she’d like to approach 2025: “softness.” I think when it comes to friendship, softness might mean forgiving yourself for not being able to do it all, and trusting that your people will still be there.

On reading Ava’s and Haley’s takes on friendship and commitment, I felt pulled to neatly categorise them into two phases. Your twenties, for Ava’s friendship dedication, and your thirties, for Haley’s flexibile spontaneity (earned by your committed twenties era). But there are outliers to this - like my aforementioned friend, still in her twenties and buckling under the weight of a stacked calendar, and on the other side, people who have gaps they want to fill. The feeling that they haven’t yet met their people.

This is something Alice Rizzo writes about in her newsletter, Platonic Vibes. Alice writes about the pursuit of friendship and has just started an experiment to nurture an acquaintance to a fully-fledged friend via letter writing. Her desire to do so isn’t totally random, she writes candidly about feeling like friendships hadn’t always clicked:

Of course what happens next is a spark of hope, which will be documented in her epistolary newsletters to come, but her story reminds us the other side. Friendship anxiety can come both from having too many and not enough people to please.

So where does that leave us? Not another essay declaring that many things can be true at once… But also that. I think one of the main things to notice is that friendship as a facet of our lives is as worthy of dissection and care as any other - we talk a lot about romantic relationships and work and family but friendship is rarely offered that same weight for discussion. I notice this when friendship comes up in therapy - it’s rarely the topic I enter the room with but it always bubbles up, in weird and mysterious corners I thought were completely detached.

As spring unfolds and the summer heat creeps in, I want to try and straddle both camps. I want to make plans that bank on future me feeling ‘up for it,’ because why not make that bet? But equally, I want to wake up on a Saturday, the day stretched out ahead, and gather the troops for something last minute and playful. I hope you’ll join me.

Further reading on friendship

• What adults forget about friendship by Rhaina Cohen

• The easiest way to keep your friends by Serena Dai

• What if friendship, not marriage, was at the centre of our lives? by Rhaina Cohen

• My buddy by Patti Smith

• It’s your friends who break your heart by Jennifer Senior

And finally…

News from the Capsule universe this week:

• In honour of the Severance finale, here are Britt Lower’s (Helly R) best looks. No spoilers don’t worry!

• Three words: Rihanna, flip-flop, heeled 

• A new Glossier scent is coming

• Emma Chamberlain’s next move? Acting

• Guess who’s making a comeback

• Nicely done: Bad Bunny for Calvin Klein

• Love to see Bella Ramsey profiled by Zing Tsjeng for British Vogue

• Last week we said rosettes were an emerging trend, here’s another example

• A good magazine cover

• FKA twigs explained why she put North West on the album

• And Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker went public with their relationship in a very chic way: a New Yorker profile. Here’s Phoebe’s reaction 

This week, Kya Buller and Sophia Wild (aka @thereadroom) popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Kya and Sophia are two Manchester-based best friends who quickly realised their love for each other was strengthened by their combined love of literature. After years of exchanging book recommendations and discussing their favourite authors, they decided to launch The Read Room - a book club that's perfect for those who are just starting out on their reading journey, or have been reading for years. They also happen to be very in sync with their opinions.

📺 Watching: The film Adult Best Friends on Apple TV and Adolescence on Netflix. I’ve also been watching a bunch of Solange live videos because I am ready for that woman to return. This is one of the best:

📖 Reading: Morgan Maher and Shaad D’Souza’s interview with HAIM for i-D, and this interview between Pandora Sykes and Ochuko Akpovbovbo on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count. Criticism is alive and well!

🎧 Listening to: The new Japanese Breakfast album, also giving the Selena Gomez x benny blanco a spin, and two excellent podcasts: Jonathan Anderson’s episode of Fashion Neurosis (what a man), and this great episode of the Modern Love podcast with Lucy Dacus, which includes an interview and an essay that’s in close dialogue with her song ‘Talk,’ about communicating and connecting in long term relationships.

Scrumpy has some trend intel — this week, searches for “belt bags” outweighed searches for “makeup bags” (that’s big!), and Frank Ocean was also spotted in Japan with the Prada belt bag from the SS25 collection. That’s a bag of the moment right there, expect to see many dupes out and around in the coming months.

If you’d like to adopt Scrumpy or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

In some of the products we recommend, we may earn a small affiliate commission. We only ever recommend things we genuinely like and would buy, and this small revenue driver goes directly towards keeping Capsule going. Thank you for the support. 🫶