We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

By Billy Baker

Released January 26, 2021

At the age of forty, having settled into his busy career and active family life, Billy Baker discovers that he’s lost something crucial along the way: his friends. Other priorities always seemed to come first, until all his close friendships had lapsed into distant memories. When he takes an assignment to write an article about the modern loneliness epidemic, he realizes just how common it is to be a middle-aged loner: almost fifty million Americans over the age of forty-five, especially men, suffer from chronic loneliness, which the surgeon general has declared one of the nation’s “greatest pathologies,” worse than smoking, obesity, or heart disease in increasing a person’s risk for premature death. Determined to defy these odds, Baker vows to salvage his lost friendships and blaze a path for men (and women) everywhere to improve their relationships old and new.

Billy Baker is a staff writer for The Boston Globe, where he writes narrative features and humorous columns. A native of South Boston, he is a graduate of Boston Latin School, Tulane University, and the Columbia Journalism School. He has received the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence from the American Society of News Editors, and was a member of the Globe team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings.