Accidental Friends

Friendship, as literature has long understood, is one of life’s noblest and least orderly arrangements. It rarely arrives by appointment, almost never consults a plan, and frequently begins with exactly the sort of misunderstanding, awkwardness or inconvenience that sensible adults would avoid at all costs. Accidental Friends by Helena Pielichaty understands this perfectly. Published in 2008 by Oxford University Press, it offers the sort of story that knows friendship can be messy, surprising, transformative and, above all, deeply resistant to tidy scheduling.

The title is immediately appealing because it admits what many stories about companionship politely ignore: quite a lot of friendship is accidental. People collide. Circumstances intervene. Personalities clash, then soften. Someone ends up sitting next to someone else, or being stuck in a situation they would not have chosen, and before long a bond forms in defiance of original intentions. There is something refreshingly honest about that. Very few people go out announcing, “Today I shall form a meaningful and character-building relationship.” Usually it just happens while everyone is busy being annoyed, embarrassed or inconvenienced.

Helena Pielichaty has a gift for writing stories rooted in emotional reality, and books like this tend to succeed because they understand that younger readers do not require artificial sweetness in order to care. They require recognisable feelings, recognisable difficulties, and characters whose emotions are treated as real rather than decorative. Friendship, especially in childhood and adolescence, can feel enormous — joyful one moment, catastrophic the next, full of small loyalties and bruising misunderstandings. It is serious business disguised as ordinary life. A good writer knows that, and one suspects this book does too.

There is also something quietly marvellous about the phrase Accidental Friends because it sounds almost like a bureaucratic category, as though somewhere there exists a filing system in which all the most important human connections are stored under “unexpected social developments.” It gives the whole business a faintly comic air, which is fitting, because friendship often does begin with the kind of circumstances that would be absurd if they were not also emotionally significant. The very best children’s and young readers’ fiction often understands this duality: life is funny, painful, embarrassing and important all at once.

Being an Oxford University Press publication adds its own subtle charm. There is something delightful about a press associated with gravitas, dictionaries and scholarly authority also producing a story about the chaos of human connection. One imagines the ancient machinery of academic publishing nodding solemnly and agreeing that yes, accidental friendship is indeed worthy of documentation. And quite right too. The small emotional dramas of ordinary life deserve just as much attention as any empire or theorem, especially when they are the very things that shape us.

Published in 2008, the book also belongs to that interesting late-2000s moment before everything in younger people’s lives became fully mediated by smartphones, feeds and permanent digital commentary. Friendship here is likely to feel tangible in the older, better way: based on actual encounters, shared predicaments, emotional risk and face-to-face complication. A refreshing thought. There was once a time when people had to misunderstand each other in person, which, while less efficient, did at least provide better material for fiction.

This Good copy, sold by the ever-underrated Crappy Old Books, has the honest, respectable condition of a book that has likely done what books for younger readers are meant to do: been handled, read, perhaps enjoyed in a slightly crumpled but genuine way. A children’s or young readers’ book in untouched museum perfection can sometimes seem a little lonely. A good copy suggests it has had a life, which suits a story about friendships formed in the rough-and-tumble of actual experience.

For readers who enjoy warm, perceptive stories about relationships, growing up, and the strange wonderful business of liking people you had absolutely no intention of liking, Accidental Friends is an appealing little find. It reminds us that some of the best things in life arrive unplanned, unceremonious and entirely by chance — which is lovely, really, though terribly inconvenient for anyone trying to organise the shelves.

Keep browsing: See more Kids books Other books by Helena Pielichaty