Marlena, by Julie Buntin, focuses on the friendship of two teenage girls-one of whom (a troubled soul and adventurer) dies tragically, leaving the other to grapple with the terms of their relationship. In this friendship, Cat, age 15, is recently plucked from her home and moved to a trailer park in northern Michigan as a result of her parents’ messy divorce. Like any good novel, the stakes seem higher in Marlena. Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life follows the friendship of four queer men who support one another while dealing with trauma rooted in their coming of age.Įlena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, the last of the Neapolitan novels, revisits a pivotal moment in the main characters’ friendship, answering old mysteries while also tracking a new story line about one of the women’s disappearance decades later. And Julie Buntin, in her raw debut novel, nails it. Platonic relationships, as a subject of and catalyst for writing, present the richness and profundity of the connections we have with nonfamilial, nonromantic companions. The authors (and friends) Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, in A Secret Sisterhood, also document literary friendships, focusing on the influential relationships that some famous women writers had with one another.

The friendship was said to have changed Dickinson, giving her a new confidence, as Martha Ackmann chronicles in her book These Fevered Days.

All three books explore the teenage ferocity of female. The letter sparked an enduring correspondence between the two, who became friends before eventually meeting eight years later. Julie Buntin’s Marlena is the latest in a string of novels to frame a coming-of-age narrative around an intoxicating teenage girl. Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to a stranger in 1870 in which she asked the recipient, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to read a few of her poems.

Julie buntin books