Wattpad Block Party - Summer Edition IV

LillieVale Presents: Female Friendship in YA

Hey, Wattpaders! I'm so excited to be back with you for another Block Party! Big thanks to Kelly for hosting and asking me back for a fifth time! Today I'm going to be talking to you about one of my favorite topics—friendship in YA, specifically intense, nuanced female friendships and why they're important.

With aspirational #squadgoals and girl squads popularized in the last few years, we're starting to see TV, film, and literature start to examine the complexity of friendship in a deeper way. Which! I! Am! So! Excited! About! Especially books like the (newly released!) NOT THE GIRLS YOU'RE LOOKING FOR by Aminah Mae Safi and the March 2019 SMALL TOWN HEARTS by me!

But let's not forget about the OGs of YA BFFs. I remember devouring The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Baby-sitters Club, and Nancy Drew as a young reader and thinking: This is sisterhood. Then, as a teen, getting into One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl, and getting my first glimpse of friends who loved as fiercely as they hated, who wielded their tongues like a blade and knew exactly where to cut so it hurt. It seemed so at odds with the rosy glow of friendship I remembered as a kid, and at the same time....not so at odds.

Girls like Peyton, Brooke, Serena, and Blair spent as much time on the outs as they did having each other's backs. Sometimes they raised each other up and celebrated each other in YASSS QUEEN moments (yes, before that was even a thing), and I loved them for it. Sometimes they were frenemies and I exasperatedly wondered why they were even friends.

I grew up, made friends, lost some along the way. And I learned this, too: Friendships aren't static. And sometimes a change—a betrayal, usually—can lead two girls who thought they knew who they were and what their friendship was, to evolve in ways which are imperfect, confusing, and sometimes downright hostile. And I also knew, even back then, before I even decided I wanted to be an author, that exploring the dynamics of changing friendships was going to be important to me.

It would take many friendships later before I wrote the first book where this happened—2016 Watty winner Willa & the Extraordinary Internship. Then, a few months later, I was writing the book that would one day become my debut novel, SMALL TOWN HEARTS (formerly BITTER BREWS). In both iterations of this story, Babe, my main character, had a tumultuous relationship with her two best friends. They were fierce in their care of each other, and ruthless in how they responded to changes. They were all flawed, all strong, all selfish in their own ways. They weren't the rosy Nancy and Bess from childhood, but something sharper, more incendiary. And I loved them for it.