There is a curious and not quite consciously planned pattern in my novel’s first draft—at three different stages in the book, the narrator, a teenage girl, befriends other teenage girls who are more initiated to the dangers of the world than she is. There is Danni, her Chinese classmate who hosts get-togethers for problem students in the apartment she shares with her deaf grandmother, Addie, a biracial student attending a second-rate international school who is caught up in Shanghai’s see-and-be-seen nightlife scene, and finally Zoey, an ultra-wealthy Texan from a family relocated on an expat package, who’s glided through the city’s expat upper crust for long enough to be morally numb to excess.
At first, the fact that all three characters existed struck me as ridiculous. Clearly, I was circling around a “bad influence” character who was luring my heroine into the world of vice, and three was overkill. But I found the “bad influence” trio hard to condense. The draft is about a teenage girl and her relation to the worlds around her, and it is also about a city, Shanghai, and its complex layers. The protagonist is an outsider who doesn’t fully belong to any of these layers, and Danni, Addie, and Zoey act as gatekeepers to different worlds with starkly different racial, socioeconomic, and legal characteristics. To access these different worlds, none of which she neatly fits, my protagonist needs to befriend people in them.
In the books I was reading while working on my first draft, the “dangerous friend” emerged as a tireless archetype. It seemed like an entire “teenage girls and trouble” sub-genre featured the dichotomy of a precocious, even-keeled but waiting-for-something-to-happen main character, and an often more attractive, more fiery, and infinitely more dangerous friend who embroils the protagonist into situations with perilous stakes. But why is this such a timeless set-up for girls going down the wrong path?
It is true that the formative years of girlhood are often defined by friendship, not romance. “For so many women, the process of becoming requires two,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Butin’s Marlena. This idea underlies many fictional female friend duos: Zadie Smith noted in an interview that the impetus for her novel Swing Time came from a recurring theme in her conversations with women, whose “childhood friendships are dominant in their minds and imaginations.”
It is tempting to discern a pattern where the less outwardly magnetic character is by nature the observer and the chronicler. In the fictional friend duos, a recurring theme is the imbalance in power or charisma between a more dominant character and a less worldly-wise friend; curiously, the “follower” of the duo is often the one taking charge of the story as the narrator, soaking up and spilling back out the life fuel syphoned from the dominant friend. These stories often track parallel fates where the beautiful, dangerous friend succumbs to tragedy like moth to fire, while the observer-narrator survives, not unscathed by moral perils, and can tell the story of their coming-of-age. My past year’s reading list offered no dearth of examples: Marlena, a novel set in a bleak low-income community in rural Michigan, has the title character as the beautiful, vulnerable, and badly behaved new best friend that the new-to-town narrator simultaneously envies, emulates, protects, and exploits. In the Girls from Corona del Mar, the pretty, enviable best friend with the seemingly perfect life that degrades into tragedy haunts the cerebral, academically successful narrator. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena, the observant but more restrained narrator, is the witness and actor in the saga she shares with the life-force that is her friend Lila— charming, feral, fearless, grinding her way through life while generating flying sparks that Elena cannot as easily produce. Love and resentment coexist in these narrators’ tones: they want to be like their friends, but not end up like them.
Of course, there were plenty of exceptions and complications to this dichotomy. In Ugly Girls, a gritty trailer park coming-of-age story, Perry is the pretty cold fish, but her best friend Baby Girl is the one reeling from recent tragedy and taking out her rage by vandalizing her own appearance, succumbing to dark impulses that get the girls into intractable trouble. Neither girl dominates the narrative, but it is the scarred, emotionally vulnerable, and physically diffident Baby Girl who is headed towards tragedy, not the beautiful, apathetic Perry. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator is a textbook parody of a “bad friend”—a young woman who is beautiful, wealthy, and seemingly emotionally and morally despondent. Her self-appointed sidekick, Reva, is the one who desperately tries to maintain the friendship through visits to the narrator’s apartment, chattering about her insecurities and sorrows. While Reva drinks alone and spills her guts to the narrator, the latter makes it no secret that she finds Reva pathetic and her presence unwelcome. Still, oddly, Reva is the life force that humanizes the story, providing relief and pathos for the reader to break up long stretches of the narrator’s largely pharmaceutically focused and eventless interior life (the backstory of a tragic childhood is interspersed, but feels like an afterthought). Reva is also a gatekeeper in the novel—to the outside world that the narrator so doggedly tries to shun, only to find it intruding her “relaxation” time and again, in the form of a Reva determined to share the indignities and mundanities of the human experience with the one person who seems to refuse human connection.
In a Guardian article on the recent flourishing of novels on dangerous female friendship, Alex Clark notes that the setup is often not as straightforward as “friends as bad influence,” but rather commentary on the protagonist’s “surrender to the enablement of transgressive behavior, while simultaneously being able to pretend that it is at a distance.” After all, starting with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, dangerous best friends are not just there to one-dimensionally corrupt the innocent; the story is often about just how much the “innocent” was courting danger in the first place. In Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which features a duo of female friends at its center, the narrator is more sardonic and less fiery than Bobbi, who at first deceivingly seems like the daredevil who initiates the narrator into a world of older, wealthier artists on the London scene. The opening chapters deliver this plot point, but the “corrupting best friend” archetype more or less dissolves here. The narrator largely takes responsibility as the originator of her ethically prickly decisions throughout the novel; in fact, she hides her transgressions from Bobbi. Whether their relationship can survive the revelation that the placid narrator has been living a secret amoral life becomes one of the story’s central tensions.
In my novel-in-progress, the protagonist is not so much concerned with building friendships as much as trying out different associations and testing her own boundaries; she is beguiled by the notion that it is through transgressing outward that one can come to define one’s own edges. Literary scholar Elizabeth Abel hypothesized in a 1981 essay that female friendship in fiction is a central vehicle for a character to build a sense of self through a deliberate quest of identification with another. This makes sense in coming-of-age fiction: you want to befriend those you wish to identify with, and sometimes you need to stretch yourself to fit that identity. I’ve come to think that a narrator like mine isn’t so much a cold, calculating monster with a predetermined social Everest to climb, but rather a fairly normal teenager who is trying to associate with the kind of people she thinks she might want to become. The darkness emerges from how quickly a person is willing to identify with a friend, then discard her after discovering this specific identification comes with obvious drawbacks, no longer fits, or can be swapped for a better model.
In revising, I must address the fear that my narrator’s three relationships with dangerous friends will feel synthetic. Although these associations are artificial in design in my narrator’s mind, they must still yield real emotions and consequences. The protagonist, Danni, Addie, and Zoey fail to protect each other because the culture of transactionalism and hedonism that permeates some circles in Shanghai (and many a New York or L.A. coming-of-age novel) dictates that people who you think can serve up nominal friendship, or at least won’t consciously leave you in harm’s way, often fail to meet the lowest of expectations.
Characters we create can begin telling their own stories to us based on motifs we were not aware we had sprinkled through our drafts. Unwittingly, the pattern of attempted friendships or associations with dangerous girls revealed another central theme of my novel, which was how ultimately friendless the protagonist is, and how much of an outsider she still remains despite her various forays. The one consequence to her dangerous friendships that she is certain to reap is not the perverse glamour of self-destruction, but loneliness. She is her own only friend, and a dangerous one.
Aube Rey Lescure
2019 Ivan Gold Fellow
