No wonder adolescent years are such fertile ground for novelists. It is one of those times when change is accelerated as we are pushed into unavoidable, exciting, frightening adulthood. Sometimes willing, sometimes not, we become aware of the controlled safety of childhood slowly retreating into the shadowy past. I always think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the essence of adolescence, where danger and excitement hang in the air but can evaporate in a puff of wind.
Things can happen in that cliff-edge time. “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.” So says a character in Megan Abbott’s thriller Dare Me. It’s something I wanted to capture in my new novel Crushed. The three girls in the novel are from very different backgrounds but the various alchemies of home life, coupled with their emotional trajectories, collide and explode and what could have become simply a rueful memory of youthful difficulties turns abruptly toxic and marks them forever.
Her are 10 others that have explored this terrain:
1. The Girls by Emma Cline
What I love about this novel is that it acknowledges how intense and passionate the relationships between teenage girls can be, that these friendships can be the drivers of events as much as any romantic relationship. The novel is modelled on the notorious Charles Manson cult who went on to murder the actor Sharon Tate. Here, 14-year-old Evie is captivated by a group of drifter girls, in particular Suzanne. This draws her into a terrifying world.
2. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
I very much relate to a line in an interview given by Ferrante to the Paris Review where she explains: “At 15 I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble.” The first of her Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend traces the fertile relationship between Elena and Lina. The dense atmosphere of place is almost as intense as the bond between the girls whose lives intersect in every twist and turn, in this book and beyond.
3. Dare Me by Megan Abbott
Abbott is brilliant at depicting teenage girls and this novel takes the stakes between them to new heights. When coach Colette French arrives at a new school she skews loyalties and turns the cheer squad into warriors. This is no anodyne high school story though, it’s a very dark tale that lays bare the power structures and plays between teenage girls and obsessive love that, in this book, proves to be toxically dangerous.
4. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
O’Brien’s young protagonists Cait and Baba exploded into a seemingly unoccupied political space, bravely and with great heart. In an article for the Irish Times, Eimear McBride said it was “nothing short of revolutionary”, and that “O’Brien gave voice to the experiences of a previously muzzled generation of Irish women”. It’s the two expertly, beautifully realised and very different voices of these two friends from childhood, setting out for adventure in the big city, that stay with me in all their humour and heartbreaking glory.
5. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
The book begins with a teenager setting fire to a house in Shaker Heights – a progressive, affluent suburb where seemingly well-intentioned liberalism keeps society ticking quietly forward with safely shared values. When a white family attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby it rips this community apart. What’s fascinating is how the group of teenagers at the core of the book react to the events. Brilliant on the loves, friendships and dreams of adolescents.
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A bit of a cheat as this is not strictly a friendship book as the little women of the title are four sisters who are, however, mostly heartwarmingly close. Published in 1868 to huge acclaim, the title was supposed to describe that intersection between childhood and womanhood that we now call “teenage”. In some ways this is a radical book, as this is practically an all-woman household and the bonds between the girls, and the trajectories of their lives, are described with a fulsome seriousness of intent.
7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Holden Caulfield is a reminder of just how difficult teenage relationships can be as he busily goes about wrecking potential friendships and romantic connections with self-sabotaging behaviour, by turns self-righteous and highly strung. The book contains some of the most beautifully comic writing in the English language. However many times I read it, lines like these still make me laugh out loud: “I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you’ – I’m positive, in fact.”
8. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
It’s 25 years since I first encountered Tartt’s novel but I return to it regularly. This strange, hypnotic book about a group of students with an obsession with the classics that leads them on a murderous journey is as much about group-think as friendship, and how the one can tip into the other. Like all great novels it has a sense of mystery that is coupled with a feeling of inevitability, growing as naturally out of character, time and place as a tree does from the ground.
9. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
After they have been introduced by the desperately sad Miss Havisham, the friendship between the young Pip and Miss Havisham’s cold protege Estella is an exquisite portrait of an adolescent relationship. Confusion and longing resonate between them, with Pip’s frustrated admiration and Estella’s clearly stated mission to break his heart providing the high psychic drama.
10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
This is one of the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. The story is narrated, in a brilliantly unflowery style that manages to be slightly flat yet completely compelling, by 31-year-old Kathy, who is some kind of “carer”. She is looking back on her student days at “Hailsham” boarding school, which is both seemingly idyllic yet oddly deprived. It’s based around a triangle of three friends – Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who are moved to “the cottages” at the age of 16 where the truth of their situation begins horrifically to emerge. Their closeness manages to overturn the tight jealousies of the group. A bold, beautiful yet fragile book.
• Crushed by Kate Hamer is published by Faber. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.
