It can be hard to pick where a novel begins. Both in the sense of remembering the spark that made you want to tell the story in the first place, and in terms of deciding on the moment that starts the book – the scene that is going to usher readers into the tale you have created.
With my second novel, a story of dangerous female friendship set in the Australian Blue Mountains, both are clear to me. I wanted, from the very beginning, to write a love triangle with stakes. In my opening scene, my narrator, her high school best friend, and the narrator’s girlfriend go rock-climbing. The reader can sense the tension as the young women get ready to go over the edge: something is not right. But in terms of where the story really started, it was the breakdown of a friendship in my personal life that forced me to delve into bad friendships in all their messy glory. That was the spark that set the fire of the book alight. That moment on the cliff top was, put quite simply, me working through some stuff.
Why are bad friendships so interesting? Perhaps because we have a script for romantic breakdown, but not for what happens when the people who are supposed to like us – to see us – bring out something in us that we don’t know how to handle. When I say criminally bad friendships, I’m thinking less buddies-in-crime, and more the friendships that push the needle into the darker parts of human experience.
If we’re talking about this particular kind of bad friend in literature (which, dear reader, I can assure you we are!), then Patricia Highsmith has to get a mention. Not least Tom Ripley and the ill-fated Dickie Greenleaf in Highsmith’s iconic The Talented Mr Ripley. Dickie, a rich golden boy, shows Tom Ripley everything he wants to be, and is murdered as a thank you.
Friends are supposed to be a reflection of who we are, and – as with Tom and Dickie – often offer a tantalizing glimpse of a self we would like to be. What is shocking is when they bring out a part of us that we don’t want to see or acknowledge. I think the most interesting bad friends show us something in ourselves that we weren’t even aware of before we met. I also happen to think the perfect bad friendship has a one-sided sexual tension or unrequited love element. Something my narrator, Finn, and her best friend Daphne have in spades.
Many of us, when asked, can conjure at least one friendship that soured. Where we felt deeply and were fully invested, but some essential miscommunication or mismatch took place. Perhaps you lingered in the boundary between love and hate, or experienced a dismayingly visceral reaction to something relatively small. Precisely because they are supposed to be the result of free choice, extricating ourselves from a bad or ill-fated friendship can seem especially fraught.
Keen for more bad friends in literature? Then look no further than The Secret History by Donna Tartt, where the narrator is drawn into a world, and a murder, by his desperate longing to belong in a glamourous group of old-money students. The Group by the Swedish writer Sigge Eklund has shades of both Highsmith and Tartt and features young museum-intern Hanna, desperate to ingratiate herself with a group of wealthy, startlingly beautiful Swedes she sees one day while working in Spain (things escalate). Tartt revisits intense friendship vibes in The Goldfinch, when the narrator’s friend pulls him into a dangerous world of crime after they help each other survive childhood.
I’m particularly interested not in the bad friends that we hold at bay, that we know are bad for us, but the ones that get under our skin, that know things about us that the rest of the world doesn’t. It’s like taking two magnets that are strongly attracted each other and flipping one. The intensity of the connection becomes the intensity of the repulsion. My narrator Finn asserts again and again that no one knows her like her best friend Daphne, that she owes her everything. I’m interested in the sort of character that feels powerless in the face of that kind of physics. If you’ve ever found yourself unable to say no to someone, what does that give you permission to do? And what happens when we let our boundaries be trodden on?
I came across more than one bad friendship while serving as a judge for the 36th Lambda Literary awards (which celebrate queer writing) in the LGBTQ+ Mystery category. (Side note, I instantly wanted to tweak this for my own Instagram: My name is Hayley Scrivenor and I identify as a Bisexual Mystery). The judging process revealed two shortlisted books that stood out to me in their portrayal of friendship. Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones starts with a missing woman named Lauren. When Lauren’s best friend Nicole returns to the town where they both grew up, and that Lauren went missing from, Nicole is forced to revisit her often-claustrophobic friendship with the difficult Lauren. This is one of those friendships that chafe in the best way. Attraction, jealousy, anger, love: it’s all here. Rebecca McKanna’s Don’t Forget the Girl tells the story of another missing girl, Abby – presumably the victim of a notorious serial killer, but there is a lack of proof. One of the friends Abby leaves behind, Chelsea, was more than just a friend. As an adult, Chelsea becomes a (bisexual) priest, struggling with the ambiguous loss because no one knew about the depth of her connection with Abby. While maybe not a true criminally bad friend (as the love is not unrequited, just messy), the intensity of this connection when the girls are in college together does have terrible consequences when Abby finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Someone – and this is not a spoiler, it’s on the back of the book – dies on that cliff in the opening of my novel Girl Falling. The fractured friendship at the heart of my second book has deadly consequences. The irony of course is that because my own second novel grew out of a friendship breakdown in my life, I am the undisputed worse friend in this scenario: what sort of weirdo goes and writes a novel about the private, painful breakdown of an intimate connection? Even if they disguise it through every possible change in particulars. Who would then write an article about that breakdown, even in the most general of terms?
I think of this person, my former friend – blue light on a face in the dark on the other side of the computer screen – reading this essay and I feel something that is between sick and a thrill. (For anyone trying to keep track of my life through book-release-related-craft-essays, it’s the same friend that I mention at the start of this CrimeReads Essay). So it’s me. Hi. I’m the bad friend. I’m the one who’s gone and written a crime novel about the whole thing. I think I needed to write about the consequences of letting parts of you be eroded, of saying yes when you mean no, and of the responsibility we all have to hold our own line. As I learned through writing my novel, it takes two people to have a bad friendship. In the end, I hope this book rose above me and my stuff, to become a story that is greater than the sum of these (shameful) parts. But of course I would think that. I acknowledge that when all is said and done, it still makes me the bad friend.
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