I'm so pleased to welcome Tracey Sinclair to my blog, with this fabulous post about female friendships--something I've been thinking about lately, having moved recently and needing to make new friends! You can learn more about Tracey and her books by following the links at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
Why female
friendships are at the heart of my books
If I had to point to an (unexpected) theme in my work, other
than a certain Northern attitude and a tendency to swear, it would be that of
female friendships. When I look at my books, which span a number of genres –
from literary fiction to romantic comedy to paranormal – it’s a common thread,
even though it was never intended to be.
My first book, Doll, was about the catastrophic
aftermath of losing your closest friend – the protagonist Thea embarks on a self-destructive
journey while reeling from grief over her best friend’s death. Having
shamelessly plundered my teenage years for material – merrily utilising (and
distorting) details of my own life and that of my oldest friend – I revisited
the same well for my romantic comedy, Bridesmaid Blues. Well, I figured if
my friend wasn’t mad at me the first time, she wouldn’t be the second, either!
The premise for Bridesmaid Blues came straight out
of my own life: after a nasty break up with the man I at the time thought was
the love of my life (and who was the brother of the boyfriend of a close
friend), I ended up being the only bridesmaid at their wedding, where he was
the best man. Come on – you can’t not use material like that! The book is a
romantic comedy: will the heroine Luce get back together with the man who
dumped her and broke her heart? But it’s also about friendships, and how they change.
To become the woman she needs to be to find happiness, Luce has to grow out of
the wayward little sister role she has fallen into with best friend Jenna, as
well as re-evaluate her relationship with her glamorous pal Hali, and turn it
into a proper friendship, rather than a form of hero worship – and I enjoyed
writing (and reading!) those bits of the book as much as any of the romantic
stuff!
Even my paranormal series, Dark Dates, has female
friendship at its core. While the plots centre around whatever paranormal
threat the heroine Cass has to deal with du jour (with some sexy romance thrown
in courtesy of a couple of smokin’ hot heroes), the lynchpin of the series is
how she moves from being a loner – and lonely – to building her own Buffy-style
‘Scooby gang’, and developing a real friendship with her colleague Medea and
Medea’s fiancée, Katie.
In part I think this is because female friendship is so
central to my own life (I do have male friends I love very dearly, of course,
but that tends to be a slightly different beast). I’m an only child, so have
consciously created a network of friends who are like family to me, and whom I
treasure even more now we’re getting older and those friendships have survived
the inevitable occasional battering by life’s trials and tribulations. So, my
friendships have always loomed large in my life: it makes sense that they would
in my work, too.
Tracey Sinclair is an author and freelance editor and writer. Her
books include the romcom The Bridesmaid Blues and the Dark Dates/Cassandra Bick
series, the latest of which, Angel Falls, is out now.
@thriftygal
