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More on Girl Friendships in YA Fiction: Guest Post by Morgan Matson

March 19, 2014 |

Earlier in this series, Jessica Spotswood talked about female friendship in YA fiction. Today, we’re going to revisit that topic with a post from Morgan Matson. Let’s keep talking about where and how we are and are not seeing positive girl friendships in YA fiction. 






Morgan Matson received her MFA in Writing for Children from the New School. She was named a Publishers Weekly Flying Start author for her first book, Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour, which was also recognized as an ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults. Her second book, Second Chance Summer, won the California State Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles. 










When I was asked to do this guest post, and given a list of possible topic ideas, the one that I knew I had to write about, without a second thought, was friendship in YA literature. Because of the nature of the books I’ve been writing recently, it’s been on my  mind. But it’s been something I’ve been thinking about, on and off, for years.

In the spring of 2012, I was putting the final touches on Second Chance Summer, my second book. The book was pretty much done – which meant it was time to figure out what the next book was going to be.

I had an idea. But I didn’t love it. It was about a girl, and a boy, and a breakup, and a new boy, some family drama, and maybe some stuff with Ibsen and the school’s theater department (this idea never really got very far). But I kept thinking that it felt like I’d already written the book, before I even started it. And a persistent thought kept swirling around in my head – I didn’t just want to write about romance. I wanted to write about friendship.

In my high school experience, it was my friends who were my constant, my tight-knit group of four (and then five, and then six) who were the center of my world. Boys were there, of course – to swoon over and crush on and date and go to the prom with and sob over at two AM. They were there filling the pages of my journal and the subject of hours and hours of phone calls. But when I think back on my high school experience, the boys were the cameos and exciting guest stars, while my friends were the series regulars. Friendship was, in experience, more important to me than romance. So why hadn’t friendship featured more in my books until now?

Why did it seem like friendship was always taking a backseat to romance in YA?

It just seems like, more often than not (and I count myself in this group) authors are much more focused on the romance, and the friend often takes the role the BFF takes in a rom-com – there in the background, to talk to the heroine about her boy problems, and not do much else.

It raised the question for me – is romance simply easier to write? There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of chemistry between two characters, that initial spark, the obstacles, the feeling that the romance is building to something….whereas friendship usually has much fewer obstacles, a more difficult-to-describe chemistry, and only builds to…a deeper and more meaningful friendship. Is this why friendship loses out to love?

This is not to say that there aren’t absolutely amazing examples of YA girl friendships. With Scarlett and Halley in Someone Like You, Sarah Dessen entered the Book Friendship Hall of Fame. Theirs is a friendship that goes back years, with a rich history that feels real. Even though we’re seeing Halley and Scarlett in high school, you can sense in their interactions their younger selves. It’s not a static, idealized friendship, either. There is deep affection between the girls, but they keep secrets from each other and let each other down and get in fights. It felt like a real friendship, the kind that shows up rarely in books, the kind that makes you want to call your BFF immediately because something in it reminds you of her. When I saw Scarlett make an appearance in This Lullaby (another Dessen knock-it-out-of-the-park friendship book, which I’ll be discussing in a bit) I was as excited to see her as any friend I hadn’t caught up with in a while. And as I got to the end of her scene, I was more disappointed than I realized I would be that we hadn’t gotten any mention of Halley. But I knew we really didn’t need one – of course Scarlett and Halley were fine. They were those kinds of friends.

I also really love the friendship dynamic between Emily and Meg in Siobhan Vivian’s Same Difference. These are girls who have been friends for years, whose friendship is tested the summer that Emily attends an art program, and Meg gets a serious boyfriend. I love this book because it deals with change within a friendship. Although it’s a bumpy journey to get there, Meg and Emily are still friends at the book’s end – and they have learned to stay friends while each allowing the other one to grow and change. I feel like seeing friendships evolve is also rarer than it should be in YA, where friendships can sometimes feel very static.

Jessi Kirby’s Golden also paints a picture of a friendship that I love. Parker and her BFF Kat have a fantastic dynamic – Parker is studious and hardworking, Kat is more daring and willing to take risks. But Kat is also the more realistic of the two, and pushes Parker to succeed, even knowing that this means that Parker will be leaving their small town – and her – behind. It’s never saccharine or overdone, but this book is a great example of what being a truly good friend can sometimes look like.

These are all amazing examples of the one-on-one BFF-dom. I feel like I see this much more in YA than the group of friends. But I’d spent high school with a group of friends, and I knew how much fun – but also how challenging – it could be, to navigate the changing dynamics between people. There are a few books that have done the group of friends so, so well, and the very best example of this is, in my opinion, are the friends in This Lullaby, also by Sarah Dessen. Not only is it one of my all-time favorite books, but there is such a great friend group at the center of it – an established group, with history and tradition and tension and rivalries. Reading this book was the first time I felt like the experience I’d had with my high school friends was truly represented. I would say that Remy’s arc with her friends is just as important – and hard to separate from – her romantic arc with Dexter. And the friends grow and change in this book, and their dynamics within the group change.

I also think that a special shout-out in the friend-group category needs to be given to Ann Brashares and the Sisterhood books. The friendship between these four girls is the focus of the series, and I loved that about it. The boys come and go but the girls are the constant, loyal to each other (sometimes to their detriment) above anyone else.

One thing I noticed, as I started to put together this list, was that all these books contain established friendships. These aren’t new friends being made over the course of the book, but friendships that have history and texture to them, that feel lived-in and real, not something new and shiny.

I have certainly been guilty of reaching for the new and shiny. In both Amy & Roger and Second Chance Summer, the friends the heroine previously had are dispatched with early on so that she can meet new people (or re-meet old friends in the case of SCS). And I notice this phenomenon a lot in YA, with a new friend there (usually along with a new boy) to take the heroine through the story.

Is it harder to write the history of a friendship (or a friend group) than a new and shiny friend, where there is everything to learn? In the same vein, is it harder to write about a relationship than the swoony, falling-in-love of it all?

This brings me back to the love vs. friendship question. I am also very guilty of this in my own writing. My heroines make friends throughout the course of the books, but the real connections they make are with boys. Romance is elevated above friendship, and by writing the books the way that I have, the message, albeit unintentional, is that romance is, in the end, more important than friendship.

There is also a striking lack of platonic girl-boy friendships in YA. There are lots of friendships that turn into romance (again, I’m guilty of this) but fewer girl-boy friendships in which neither party is interested in the other. When I was writing Since You’ve Been Gone, I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be about friendship – all different kinds. An established best-friendship, a group of friends, girl-guy friends, guy-guy friends, new friends, old friends, friendship between siblings, friendship between parents and teens. (And of course, there’s a romance as well. I mean, I wasn’t going to quit cold turkey.) I’m sure once the book is released, I’ll know how successful this was. But one of the things I’m proudest of in the book is a friendship between a guy and a girl that never turns into anything except a deeper friendship. I think that by always turning friendship into romance in YA, we’re denying a major an important fact of life – it’s possible (and recommended!) to have friends whom you don’t want to kiss.

I feel like I have raised more questions than I’ve answered in this post – but they are questions that I am trying to address, in my own way. My new book series, The Girls of Summer, is about a group of four long-time best friends who come together every summer. There are boys, of course, but friendship will be at the heart – and at the center – of the books.

***


 Morgan Matson is the author of Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour, Second Chance Summer, and the forthcoming Since You’ve Been Gone, available in early May.  

Filed Under: about the girls, female friendship, girls reading, Guest Post, Uncategorized

Positive Girl Friendships in YA: Guest Post by Jessica Spotswood

March 11, 2014 |

Is it rare to see girl friendships portrayed well in YA fiction? I tend to think that’s an area where there are fewer books than there should be and those that do tackle this subject stand out because it’s fairly rare. Today, Jessica Spotswood is here to talk about female friendship in YA, and I think she gets a little to the heart of why it might be a rare thing and why it’s something she fought for in her own work.



Jessica Spotswood is the author of the Cahill Witch Chronicles: BORN WICKED (2012), STAR CURSED (2013), and SISTERS’ FATE (August 2014). She grew up in a tiny, one-stoplight town in Pennsylvania, where she could be found swimming, playing clarinet, memorizing lines for the school play, or – most often – with her nose in a book. Now Jess lives in Washington, DC with her playwright husband and a cuddly cat named Monkey. She can be found drinking tea, teaching writing workshops for teens, or – most often – with her nose in a book. Some things never change.










When Kelly listed a range of possible topics for my guest post, one leapt out at me right away: friendships in YA. It’s a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, because I would be lost without my girl friends, but strong, positive girl friendships feel like a rarity in YA.

To be honest, they were a rarity in my life as a teen, too. There were lots of toxic friendships, the kind marred by gossip and jealousy and competition, whether it was over parts in the school plays or over boys. These kind of mean-girl dynamics tend to be super popular in YA (see: PRETTY LITTLE LIARS and GOSSIP GIRL). Two of my favorite examples of some truly vicious girls are in Courtney Summers’ SOME GIRLS ARE and in Katherine Longshore’s GILT. For less fraught examples, check out the friendships gone wrong between Samantha and Nan in Huntley Fitzpatrick’s MY LIFE NEXT DOOR, or between Cricket and Jules in Leila Howland’s NANTUCKET BLUE. I think girl-on-girl bullying, frenemies, and friend breakups are all important to portray.

It strikes me, though, that the most common girl friendships in YA are sort of token friendships – the best girl friends who recede into the background once the heroine meets the right guy. This is one of my literary pet peeves, possibly because it rings so true to my own high school experience. I was the single girl amidst lots of couples, with girl friends who only made time for me when they needed relationship advice or consolation after breakups. It made me realize early on how often we idealize romantic relationships and focus on them to the exclusion of all else, and it gave me an early feminist horror for making a boy the be-all and end-all of one’s life. I know firsthand that that dynamic is super realistic – but I don’t think it’s emotionally healthy or ideal, and too often it seems to go unquestioned within the text. If most other girls are either rivals or placeholders until our heroines meet the boys of their dreams – what is that saying? 

My editor for the Cahill Witch Chronicles is brilliant, and I take the vast majority of her suggestions. But the issue of Cate’s friends Sachiko Ishida and Rory Elliott was one that I pushed back on. Sachi and Rory are popular, fashionable, gossipy girls and Cate – who’s preoccupied with the need to protect her sisters and keep their magic a secret from the patriarchal Brotherhood – originally dismisses them as nothing but cabbageheads. But – spoiler – she’s wrong. My editor suggested early on that one of them should be after Finn, that it could be more dramatic if they functioned as rivals with Cate in some way. But it was important to me that Cate be wrong in her original estimation, that she misjudges these pretty girls who love bright colors and dresses, who choose to hide their own secrets in plain sight instead of cloistering themselves away and disdaining feminine things. One of my favorite scenes in the entire trilogy is when Cate realizes how fierce and loyal and strong Rory is, and she’s ashamed of how she’s treated her. It was important to me that Cate find true girl friends – women who are generous and clever and talented and funny, who support her and won’t let her face her problems alone – and that she realize their worth. 

I wish more YA books featured strong girl friendships – the kind worth every bit as much to the heroine as a boy, the kind who aren’t shoved off stage or reduced only to giving relationship advice, who fight the monsters or evil government right alongside the heroine. Here are three girl friendships that I think are really, really awesome:

Rose and Lissa from the VAMPIRE ACADEMY series by Richelle Mead: This was the first example that came to mind, maybe because I just saw the movie! This friendship and the shadow-kissed bond between them are really at the heart of the series. Rose has to try to negotiate her romance around her loyalty to Lissa and her professional duty as Lissa’s Guardian. There are elements of jealousy, of negotiating boundaries (especially since she has a psychic bond with Lissa), of figuring out how to define herself away from the friendship. It’s an awesome, complex relationship that’s every bit as important to both girls as their romances.

Karou and Zuzana from the DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE series by Laini Taylor: I just read the novella “Night of Cake & Puppets” and it hit me again how special this friendship is. Karou and Zuzana are fiercely protective of one another. Zuzana knows that Karou is stronger than her in many ways, but she still threatens the jerk who broke her friend’s heart. Karou is off having mad, dangerous adventures, but she still makes time to text Zuzana advice about Mik. Zuzana is Karou’s link back to the everyday, human world; Karou provides the dash of magic Zuzana desperately wants. They balance each other in a really lovely, supportive way.

Kate and Parker from THINGS I CAN’T FORGET by Miranda Kenneally: Kate is a complex girl, which is why she’s one of my favorite protagonists. She has very firm religious convictions that guide her every move, and at the beginning of the book she’s incredibly judgey. She judges Parker, who’s abandoned some of her church’s teachings and whose mom is a lesbian. Parker calls Kate out when she’s being hurtful, but over the course of the book, she becomes someone Kate can go to with frank questions about boys and sex and morality. Friends don’t always agree on the big stuff, but I love how mutually respectful Kate and Parker are.

What about you? I’d love to read about some of your favorite girl friendships in the comments.
***
Jessica Spotswood is the author of the Cahill Witch Chronicles series, including Born Wicked, Star Cursed, and the upcoming conclusion, Sisters’ Fate, available in August. 

Filed Under: about the girls, female characters, female friendship, girls reading, Uncategorized

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