In her debut novel that is raw, honest, hilarious, and thought-provoking, Lauren Saft masterfully conveys what goes on in the mind of a teenage girl and how often even the closest of friends walk the thin line between love and hate.
About Those Girls:
Junior year, the suburbs of Philadelphia. Alex, Mollie and Veronica arethose girls: They’re the best of friends and the party girls of the school. But how well does everybody know them-and really, how well do they know one another? Alex is secretly in love with the boy next door and has joined a band-without telling anyone. Mollie suffers from a popular (and possibly sociopathic) boyfriend and a serious mean streak. And Veronica just wants to be loved-literally, figuratively, physically…she’s not particular. Will this be the year that bonds them forever or tears them apart for good?
Let’s talk about insecurity. When I sat down to write “Those Girls,” my intention was to explore the deep dark caverns of my teenage self, and the most shameful places of the female mind. This book is not about the things we do and say to be liked, it’s about the things we think and feel that would immediately ensure that no one ever liked us again. To write a book about what goes on in the most horrible places of your mind, at a time when you are arguably at your most horrible, I was forced to be brutally honest about the unflattering and often embarrassing truths of what it was really like to be sixteen. And that was altogether fun, freeing, and excruciatingly challenging.
I had to shed my natural inclination to want these characters to be likable because I wanted this book to be about the dirty, vile, ridiculous things we think and do not say when we’re feeling insecure (which, for me, was basically all the time when I was that age) and the ways it manifests itself because we don’t say it. For some reason, people, especially teenagers, and especially teenage girls, do all sorts of absurd and awful things instead of just saying “I’m jealous” or “I feel left out” or “I’m afraid.” I wanted this book to be about the things that we never say out loud or ever even admit to thinking, even to ourselves, and to do that, I had to actually admit them to myself. In order to write a book about insecurity, I had to face all of my own head on, and it wasn’t pretty. But turns out that admitting that I have felt ugly, untalented, and insecure in writing actually feels a lot better than someone calling you a slut.
Author Lauren Saft
Somewhere in my twenties, I came to the realization that insecurity is actually the root of all evil. I’ve found that when people do bad things, mean things, hurt other people, it’s usually a reflex of some kind of fear—fear of being exposed, fear of being seen as not strong enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough, or somehow lesser than, like being mean will compensate for or cover up that truth. The practice of knocking someone down to raise yourself up still seems to be the most common currency among women (and frankly, men too, but I’ll keep the conversation pointed), long past adolescence. In an environment like high school, where everyone is so green, everything is so new, everyone is afraid; it’s the natural state of being during this time in life. No one has any experience, no one knows better than anyone else, despite what they might project, so this kind of loose peer-on-peer evil is inflicted all the time—and I wanted to ask, Why? How does it make your fear better? Where does it come from? And the ultimate point is that it’s ridiculous, it’s universal, and it doesn’t work. So that’s what the book is about. Those Girls does not glorify this behavior, it simply exposes its darkness, in the best way I know how to communicate darkness—with comedy.
Characters in novels are just that— characters. They are not mirrors of real people and the things they do are not meant to serve as examples of behavior; at least mine aren’t. They are vehicles used to express a greater point, to illuminate a greater story, and evoke themes and realities that cannot be personified by the acts of one “real” person. The things that happen in novels are not always real, but they make you think about the things that are.