24 The False Friend

This week I read Myla Goldberg’s novel The False Friend, about a woman who questions and investigates her memory of the day her best friend disappeared forever when they were eleven.

I adore this book. I mean, it’s painful to read, but it’s amazing and a psychological puzzle. The ending of it knocked me sideways and I’ve read it multiple times before. The two girls are abusive toward another girl who wants to be their friend, so the guilt of that and the memory of being so terrible complicates the main character’s survival guilt. The ending makes your hair stand on end, though.

I wanted to learn from it as I’m developing a very bad friend character in Summerlands to fill out one of the main characters’ arc. But oh boy, this opened up a lot of memories I’d sort of forgotten about, especially of someone I worked with almost twenty years ago now. Really bad news, that person. Such bad news that both her sister and husband warned me about her. Yikes! They weren’t wrong.

I’m fascinated by The False Friend because the main character, Celia, never lets herself off the hook for her abusive behavior, which I appreciated. But also her family and friends point out that she never acted that way before her friend came into her life or after her friend was gone. What makes people behave so cruelly to others? What makes people bad friends? I might use different reasons in my own work, but this book gave me excellent ideas.

Other texts mentioned: Hamlet, Howl’s Moving Castle, Pumpkinheads, Mean Girls, and the true story of abducted child Johnny Gosch, who I sincerely believe visited his mom and is alive and well to this day.

Also mentioned: my friend Sumara’s excellent voice acting website, where you can hear a piece of one of my novels read in her lovely voice. Go to sumarameers.com then click portfolio and scroll down to the audiobooks. It’s the first recording, the last entry in that audio file, about the god Apollo. AMAZING.