Sonia Feldman Recommends Books About the Thrilling Dynamics of Girls’ Friendship

Internet rumor holds that manga artist Naoko Takeuchi created the beloved classic Sailor Moon about a group of girls she wished were her friends because she was lonely. Memes periodically circulate with a quote to this effect, but the quote appears sadly unsubstantiated. It sort of doesn’t matter. Anyone who loves Sailor Moon feels the pull of its characters’ friendship, a group of beautiful fourteen-year-old girls who are actually the reincarnated guardians of an ancient planetary civilization with incredible outfits who spend all their time together, doing homework and fighting evil.

In my early twenties, I found myself living in my hometown, but none of my friends did the same. Their absence gave me room, and perhaps permission, to spend all my free time writing a novel that I was a little bit afraid of. Their absence also made me quite lonely. I missed my friends, and I especially missed the era of my life in which I was consumed by my friendships, the summers during which we hung out for hours and even continuous days in a row, sleeping in each other’s rooms, only to get up the next day and eat another meal together. We never had to catch each other up. We were always already caught up because we were living together on a minute by minute basis.

The book born from this missing became Girl’s Girl, a sapphic coming of age novel about teenage girls who are obsessed with each other and their complicated friendship, which becomes more complicated when two of them begin a romantic relationship and don’t tell the third. While working on Girl’s Girl, I had to rewatch all of Sailor Moon, for research purposes, obviously. I also read and reflected on a number of excellent books about girl friendship, all of which invite you into a dynamic, the feeling of being among, a thrilling place to be.

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Lisi Harrison, The Clique

Lisi Harrison’s plaid-jacketed series about a group of spoiled middle school girls wearing designer clothing and conducting psychological warfare upon one another totally lit my brain on fire when I was thirteen. Yes, I loved reading about the Y2K sartorial innovation of layering a dress on top of Sevens jeans, but what really riveted me was the revelation that books actually existed that were as obsessed with girl friendship as I was, both individual relationships and the tricky magic of group girlhood. Very little else in those books matters.

Will outsider Claire earn queen bee Massie’s respect? Will number two Alicia successfully usurp Massie’s position? If she does, can she stay there? Does she even want to? What does it mean to direct the emotional reality of a friend group, and what skills are required to take on the responsibility of making sure everyone looks cute and has fun? Reading The Clique books, I felt like, thank god someone is about to tell me.

Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches, Dogs of Summer

This short novel about feral ten-year-olds gave me permission to write a book about teenage girls for an adult literary audience that doesn’t bother justifying its interest in exactly the things the girls themselves are most interested in.

Set in the Canary Islands, Dogs of Summer has Gameboys and frantic masturbation, song lyrics and eating disorders. Isora and Shit, the moniker given by Isora to the novel’s unnamed narrator, melt into and out of one another in an exhilarating depiction of the boundarilessness of friendship at that age. Their relationship vibrates with power imbalance and unarticulated desire. This novel’s depiction of sapphic friendship and the pleasures and miseries of that infinite summer feeling have remained with me since I read the book in a single, rapt sitting.

Toni Morrison, Sula

Sula is an epic friendship novel set in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the relationship between Nel and Sula, bound to each other in fast friendship as children and bound still as adults, even as their choices divide their lives and a true betrayal upends them. As a reading experience, it’s riveting. Perfect sentence after perfect sentence that pull a tide of emotion up in your chest.

Of all the books on this list, I think Sula is the one in which the girls’ mothers play the most meaningful role. They’re characters in the novel as well, so you get to see Nel and Sula, and their friendship, in the context of their daughterhood. This contributes to the sense of understanding between the friends. They are uniquely witness to each other’s lives. The characters have a profound, private channel of communication between them that I recognize from friendships in life and have been told about in fiction, but has rarely ever felt so real to me in a book.

Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

If I Had Your Face made me irritable whenever I wasn’t reading it. It made me impatient with reality because I wanted to get back to the story, in particular, back to the company of its narrators, four young women striving toward their desires at uncertain cost in a vividly described Seoul. They all live in the same modest apartment building, some of them close friends.

They all observe each other: Kyuri, a room salon girl perfected and indebted by her extensive plastic surgery; her roommate, artist Miho; their neighbor Ara, a hairstylist who no longer speaks but is understood by her best friend Sujin; and on the floor below, newlywed Wonna, hoping for a baby she can’t afford. The novel generates an electric energy bouncing off the gaze of each woman on the others, and its heart emerges in the relationships that grow between them, their connection a counterweight to the brutal forces shaping their lives.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

This 1500 page tome of an epistolary novel from 18th century great Samuel Richardson is about a perfect, beautiful, young woman whom everyone is mad at. She sort of runs away from her evil family and sort of gets kidnapped by a Rake. She spends the considerable length of the novel attempting to defend her virtue in a society where the word “no,” when spoken by a woman, cannot ever, under any circumstances, be supposed to actually mean no. It’s a fascinating indictment of the impossibility of consent during that era.

It’s also a monument to Clarissa’s best friendship with Anna, the person to whom she spends day after day writing elaborate missives from her imprisonment. Anna is the only person in the novel who actually loves Clarissa, in spite of the protagonist’s many professed admirers. I was obsessed with this book when I read it in my early 20s and obsessed in particular with the intimacy of understanding and friendship between the two women. It’s one of the many griefs of the novel that the two of them do not, as Anna repeatedly suggests, get to run away and live together in a house that no one else is allowed to visit. I still think about them.

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Sonia Feldman’s Girl’s Girl is available now from The Dial Press.