Best Friend For Life

I don’t think I’ve ever had one!

I made this disconcerting discovery while reading the hilarious, heartbreaking, luminous (okay, all the words) novel Kin* by Tayari Jones. It’s the story of Annie and Vernice, motherless girls who “have been friends since we smiled with our milk teeth”. Their story begins in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in the ‘40’s, and it’s a historical novel in the usual sense but also in the sense of being the history of two hearts that pump the same blood. From childhood on, Annie and Niecy are everything to each other. I love fiction about women’s friendships, but this one goes deeper and wider than most. When Niecy, the meeker of the two, stands up for Annie, risking everything she’s worked her whole life to build? This is not a trope. This is not a plot climax. This is a full-body-chills moment, true in the way that the best fiction is truer than life.

While I love this novel and have been recommending it all over creation, it’s also left me feeling a little bereft. I’ve never had an Annie/Vernice in my own life! I’ve written middle grade friendships like theirs—Mo and Mercedes in What Happened on Fox Street, Flor and Sylvie in Moonpenny Island, Georgie and Eva in my current WIP —but in my own life, there’s never been a lifelong-best-friend-forever.

Instead, over the years I’ve had many good friends to love and trust and depend on, girls and women who’ve been with me through the thick and the thin. My friendship-life has been a meadow wild with blooms, a slice of bread spread edge to edge with honey. Friends have graced my life with beauty and sweetness I can only hope to return. Where is my bestie? Maybe a bit of her lives in each of these friends, women I love for all different reasons?

And maybe it’s also being a writer, spending my days imagining my way inside other people, spilling parts of myself onto the page, letting my characters in on my secrets? Maybe that fills some space inside me, sometimes giving me comfort, sometimes shaking me with revelation, the way Annie and Niecy do for each other? I don’t know!

But anyway, treat yourself to Kin. And for another story of loyalty and love, read When Tomorrow Burns, by Tae Keller, one of my very favorite middle grade writers.

*A few favorite lines—every page yields a gem:

“Babydoll knew how to wave a question like a switchblade.”

“I hope you will close your ears to the city slicksters up there. The Adversary always wears shiny shoes.”

“When I was a child, I was tender as a bruise.”

“The thing that made us different is that Annie could possibly be straightened when she was bent, while I knew I could never be upright.”