Friends Forever ... Or Maybe Not (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we're talking about navigating friendships.

There's no shortage of famous friendships in literature and movies, including Winnie-the-Pooh for kids or Harry Potter for teens or The First Wives Club for adults.

What's fascinating to me is that none of those friendships are perfect, because none of the people (or animals) involved are perfect. And that's okay.

With Winnie-the-Pooh, my kids used to ask why Pooh got upset, or Piglet was always anxious, or Eeyore SO SAD, or Tigger self-absorbed, etc. I told them that if everyone was perfect and had no problems, there wouldn't be conflict and therefore no story. (Yes, my kids were stuck with a writer for a mom. Cause for future therapy? Possibly.)

For teens, everyone knows Harry Potter. Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Harry can be thoughtless and act without thinking, but Voldemort is trying to kill him pretty much nonstop, so cut the guy a little slack, okay? Ron is frankly annoying and childish, even as they age, and there is NO WAY a Hermione in real life would wind up with him, but no one ever said J.K. Rowling could write romance. Hermione is the friend who holds the friendship together. We all need that friend.

A couple of other teen books and/or movies I love for their friendships: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Now and Then (which shows the friends as both young teens and as adults). In each case, they feature incredibly different friends who nonetheless have a powerful bond, even though they screw up that bond from time to time. They always find their way back to it.

[Since I love to digress, I will note that the actor Tom Wisdom in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is also in Pirate Radio, one of my favorite movies of all time, and he is ssssssmoking hot in both. That is all.]

An adult movie with fantastic friendships: The First Wives Club. (Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Bette Midler.) Again, they're SO different from each other, and those differences make them more interesting (and funny), but they also create massive conflicts between the characters. Those conflicts NEARLY tear them apart. But, yep, they ultimately dig deep into their friendship in order to, ultimately, achieve peace, love, and understanding.

Unfortunately, the conflicts and annoyances (and worse) among friends aren't limited to fiction. In real life, for both teens and adults, friendships blow up for any number of reasons, and it doesn't get easier with age. Jealousy, bitterness, backbiting, secrets? We've all experienced it. Sure, almost without exception it's caused by insecurity (in fiction AND reality), but understanding what's happening doesn't stop it from happening. There's a reason why terms like ghosting and gaslighting are so common these days.

You'd think that maturity would make bad behavior go the way of acne, but hoo boy: some people never truly leave high school behind. Mean girls (and boys) will always exist. (And let's face it: we were lied to about acne, too.)

From a writer's perspective, happily, those real-life issues give us a treasure trove of things to write about. And as all writers know (and laugh about), in fiction you get to kill off the jerk characters.

In real life? Best to let someone else put up with them.

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.