Words by Fiona Hardy
I’ve worked in bookselling for more than twenty-five years now, and there’s always been a lot of shuffling of sections to create space for The New Thing. We’ve let a quarter of the store be taken over by adult colouring books, shelved a lot of white-covered Scandinavian noir where everybody had to die in the snow, were swamped with boxes during the pandemic jigsaw era, watched our manga shelves expand and then shrink again all while being corrected on its pronunciation by withering teenagers (it’s closer to “mun-ga”, by the way).
Recently, the wave of enthusiasm for romance has changed our store layout, and it now has its own heavily-perused section instead of being absorbed into fiction. I love all genres, of course, but I have two issues with romance: one is that a lot of teenagers and gentle grandmothers have been caught unawares by the sweet covers only to find the content starkly spicier than expected (‘I learned some things I’d never known before,’ said one older customer, reflecting on a book she’d bought, ‘but no more in that series for me, thanks’) and the second is that there are, frankly, not enough platonic happy-ever-afters out there.
There is a lot of media available about how to become a couple – or a throuple, no judgement here – but I’d pay good dollars to see a movie or read a book that’s about how to make a friend. It’s hard as an adult to find new pals. You’re not being thrown into new school classes or weekend sports all the time by well-meaning grownups, forced to pair up with some equally hapless kid. When you grow up, you have to consciously make an effort to get new people into your life, signing yourself up for Wednesday night pickleball, or improv classes on weekends, or deliberately getting a job that’s not remote. If you have kids, it becomes easy again for a while: you can make friends with random people at playgrounds, acquaint yourself with everyone else huddled under that one shady tree at kinder or school pickup, or congratulate a parent whose child has just successfully socked yours in the face in karate lessons. I’ve had to use requisition my own child as a kind of wingman who tells me if any of her friends’ parents seem like they’re my type. I overthink how to text them about birthday part invitations. Surely dating is easier?
Is making friends hard because we no longer see examples of it? You could walk into a bookshop and trip anywhere and find a romance, but something that lays the groundwork for a healthy friendship can be much harder. Most books centred on friendships detail them fracturing rather than forming – from Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, where an offer to host an unwell old friend causes strife, to My Brilliant Friend, the Italian bestselling series by Elena Ferrante, which tracks a complex friendship over many, many years, and, incidentally, written under a pseudonym, presumably because the author’s real buddies might see themselves in her writing and ban her from the next brunch catch-up. Kate Mildenhall’s thrilling The Hidden Place, about a group of friends who buy a property with the idea of shared camping on it and ends just about how I, a person who has never holidayed with friends, imagine it would; Christine Keighery’s crime book We’re Not Us Without You sees teenage friends with a tragic past meet again in the future, hoping for reconciliation. Great books, yes, but what hope does companionship have in the literary world?
There are, of course, positive reflections, like Sarah Winman’s decade-sprawling found-family novel Still Life, or Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, if you count (decades-old spoiler incoming) criminals reuniting as “wholesome”. Even I’m not sure I can say I’ve contributed much to the positivity – while the main characters of my crime series, Alice and Teddy, are fervently loyal best mates, they also work for a criminal enterprise and spend some of their time doing minor crimes, but generally only to other bad guys. Our problem, generally, is that books solely about a lovely friendship don’t really have the dramatic capacity to sustain a narrative, even if it’s a life we want to live.
Or are we drawn to friendships that fall apart because we’re looking for what to avoid in our own lives? Is it the same reason people read true crime – because the more they know, the easier the pitfalls (like being thrown into a pit) are to avoid? More people are reading books that are gentle – like Travis Baldree’s wholesome fantasy, Legends and Lattes, about an orc opening up a coffee shop in the city – and wanting a read that won’t give them the kind of trauma that A Little Life dropped on a generation of readers. All I hope is that more books come out about friendships and how to navigate them, and that we booksellers have some time to prepare for the avalanche of colouring-book versions of them that will inevitably follow.
