Content warning: attempted suicide
I was sixteen when an internet friend first told me she wanted to die. She and I had met in person once, and for at least two years prior, we’d traded messages about Janelle Monáe and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She’d been diagnosed with depression, and that night, when she thought she was going to end it, I was the first person she told.
I didn’t know what to do. She lived over a hundred miles away, and I didn’t have a phone number for her mom. So I just started messaging her — frantically at first, an onslaught of emojis and reminders of happy moments, until, in staccato sentences, she started responding. I told her I loved her. She told me thank you. When her mom came home half an hour later, she was safe.
Weeks later, I admitted to her that I didn’t really like the person I was. I didn’t feel like anyone at my high school understood me, and I was afraid coming out as queer would only make it worse. I can’t remember what she told me next, but I know it made me realize, maybe for the first time, that I wasn’t alone.
This type of friendship, built on secrets traded from a distance, is one I’ve rarely seen reflected in pop culture. Even though 57 percent of teens have made friends online and the vast majority have never met those friends in real life, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, portrayals of internet friends in mainstream culture still verge on ridiculous. Hollywood has used internet friendships as fodder for slick dramas, like the documentary-turned-MTV-reality-show Catfish, or as the scaffolding of social satires like the Aubrey Plaza-led Ingrid Goes West, where a Pennsylvania woman moves to Los Angeles to befriend an Instagram influencer who replied to her comment one time. (The central joke is that no one acts in real life quite as they do on social media.) In music, up-and-coming groups like Superorganism, whose members were internet friends before they were band mates, have made meeting online an essential piece of their origin story, though few artists explore those relationships in their actual songs.
But in literature, especially YA literature, there has been a quiet explosion of books that portray internet friendships as most people experience them: lifelines in a world where they don’t always fit.
Even though 57 percent of teens have made friends online and the vast majority have never met those friends in real life, portrayals of internet friends in mainstream culture still verge on ridiculous.
Novels are uniquely positioned to capture the depth of an online friendship because fiction operates on the same frequency as online friendships. In each, the vehicle to understanding is written confession. It is the laying bare of your most intimate thoughts for a distant reader to piece into a narrative that, until then, no one else has quite understood.
Readers entering the mind of a fictional narrator are privy to the kinds of intimacies reserved for close friends. You can imagine a fictional first-person narrator typing up all of their hopes and dreams late into night the way I did for my internet friends.
When that novel centers internet friends, readers are primed to understand how two people who have never met could be so drawn together — and how the messages they send could hold so much power.
Book One
Mary H.K. Choi’s YA novel Emergency Contact begins with a panic attack. Penny Lee, an incoming college freshman struggling to disentangle herself from her “MILF for a mom,” finds Sam Becker, a 22-year-old barista, passed out on the street. The two had met once before because Sam is related to Penny’s college roommate, so when she drives him home and exchanges phone numbers with him, Sam quips that she’s now his “emergency contact.”
Though Penny and Sam hardly speak in real life, they launch a friendship through texts with a simple premise: they will tell each other all of the things they’re afraid to say in their real lives. For Sam, that means confessing his declining mental health; for Penny, it involves dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault and her disjointed relationship with her mom.
Sam and Penny aren’t internet-first friends; they met once before they started texting. But for them, as for the closest internet friendships, virtual space has helped them form a two-person support group. Neither is versed in the art of personal sharing, and texting offers them both the time to work through their thoughts and the distance to share them on their own terms.
That’s not to say that they all they do is swap secrets. Most conversations are less about lifelong struggles and more about whatever thoughts cross their minds — the tyranny of supermoons, for instance, or why the American healthcare system is such a mess.
Choi gives them space to wrestle through their own insecurities at their own pace. Their texts run on for pages and pages: it’s a YA contemporary novel that clocks in at nearly 400 pages. In interviews, Choi has joked that Emergency Contact is a book where “high-key nothing happens,” maybe because countless conversations don’t have immediate relevance to the overall plot. But these moments are far from inessential. They immerse you in Penny and Sam’s world.
As a reader — if you’re listening — you begin to see how their trust forms. You feel them opening up. Maybe you even feel part of their friendship.
Book Two
In Gena/Finn by Hannah Moskowitz and Kat Helgeson, another YA book, confession takes another literary form: fan fiction. Though Gena and Finn…
