Anna Faris is keeping it real when it comes to love and friendship.
Anna Faris is keeping it real when it comes to love and friendship.
In a new excerpt from her upcoming memoir, Unqualified, published on Wednesday by Cosmopolitan, the 40-year-old actress explains why Chris Pratt wasn't her "best friend," even when they were married. The two announced they were separating on Aug. 6, after eight years of marriage.
"I was once told that I didn’t need a tight group of girlfriends because Chris should be my best friend," she shares. "But I never bought that. The idea of your mate being your best friend -- it’s overhyped. I really believe that your partner serves one purpose and each friend serves another."
"There’s the friend you confess things to and the friend with whom you do the listening," she continues. "Or this is the person I talk to when I’m feeling lonely and sad, this is the person I talk to about work sh**, and this is the friend I’m still in touch with because we grew up together."
Faris says she was proud of calling herself a "guys' girl" in her 20s, but regrets her former attitude.
"I didn’t realize until later how lame I sounded, bragging as though having a lot of girlfriends was a bad thing," Faris writes. "Back then, I thought that having the approval of my stoner guy friends was of greater value than having the approval of beautiful blonde sorority girls, so I touted my male friends as if my association with them spoke to how cool I really was. I was selling my own gender down the river, and I wasn’t even getting any fulfillment from the relationships with those dudes."
"The truth of why I didn’t have girlfriends probably had nothing to do with my being a guys’ girl and everything to do with the fact that I was angry and jealous and unduly proud of the guys I was hanging out with," she adds.
Faris says she intitially stayed away from groups of girls because she was bullied growing up, describing herself as a "quiet" teenager. She recalls girls sneaking up on her and snapping her bra strap, and going to her locker one day and seeing that someone had written "f**k you, b**ch" on it.
"That’s why it took me longer than it should have to realize just how important female relationships are," she explains. "It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive, and that’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction."
These days, Faris says she has a handful of strong female confidantes, including her Mom co-star, Allison Janney.
Faris' memoir is set to be released on Oct. 24, and on Tuesday's episode of her podcast, Anna Faris Is Unqualified, she admitted she was "scared" about its release. According to excerpts obtained by Entertainment Weekly last month, Unqualified features Faris marveling about her and Pratt's happier days, along with a foreword written by Pratt himself.
"I feel really, really nervous because it feels really intimate," Faris said about her book. "I’m excited and I … you know, when I first got the book deal I thought, 'Oh, what a great adventure.' Now that it's getting closer, I feel, in a sense, that I got to always hide behind characters, and now this is me and it feels a little scary."
Watch the video below for everything we know about Faris and Pratt's shocking split.