This YA author helped usher in the 'mean girl' era. Now she's working to solve teen drama

The first novel in The Clique series published in 2004— the same year Mean Girls debuted — and they shared a vibe specific to media about teenagers in the early 2000s.

The aesthetic is sparkly lip gloss, Instant Messenger, Tiffany charm bracelets and loaded sleepover questions like: “Would you rather be a friendless loser or a person with tons of friends who secretly hate you?”

The best-selling series follows a group of East Coast girls who attend a private all-girls school. The central conflict is between Massie, the clique leader, and Claire, a newcomer from Florida, who shows up in overalls and friendship bracelets — a dead giveaway that she's too earnest to stand a chance.

Author Lisi Harrison says she’s sought to complicate the narrative of the pretty, rich, mean girl.

“When any of us are mean, we're not evil people for the most part,” Harrison says. “We're insecure people, we're neglected people and I really wanted to show that the villain, we can feel bad for the villain too.”

She’s aware of the criticism that not all readers interpreted her early work how she intended — that they read more like instructional manual than satire. Harrison says in the last two decades, the characters in her books, which span eight series, have become less materialistic and there’s less in-fighting, though the friendships still have conflict.

“I'm trying to do a lot more medicine with the sugar than I used to,” Harrison says. “I've been through a lot and I have grown a lot, so I want to share that with younger people.”

LAist caught up with the Laguna Beach-based Harrison ahead of this year’s L.A. Times Festival of Books, where she’ll be a panelist Saturday, about how her novels have changed with the times and her advice for adolescents navigating real-life drama.

Here are excerpts from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

LAist: What’s your relationship to drama, as someone who writes about it a lot? 

Lisi Harrison: I think I'm writing about it to figure it out. Really — my friendships were more à la carte than like clique-wise. ... But I'm very fascinated by insular groups, secret societies. A lot of my books have some level of a club that's hard to get into, and I think I'm just very fascinated by the dynamic of what's going on in there. And do I even want to be in there? But why are we all so drawn to it? ... We spend a lot of time exploring romantic relationships, and there's books and therapies for all sorts of those issues. It's endless. There's love songs, there's movies. But when it comes to just friend drama, I think that is an underserved area that I'm just obsessed with.

Q: What is at the root of friend drama? Do you think it's changed since you started writing?

A:  It's gotten more complicated because of social media. So now you're just aware of everything that you're not. It's in your face. You're aware of all the people that are "better" than you, whatever your metric for better is. You're aware of all the things you weren't invited to. You're aware of the fact that you're sitting in bed feeling horrible about yourself for whatever reason, but the rest of the world seems to be getting on just fine. So that just has amplified those same exact feelings that have always been there. The volume's up.

Q: What’s one lesson you feel you’ve learned in your own life that you wanted to pass on to your readers?

A: Most recently with the Graveyard Girls, we're now developing the fifth book in the series [about a group of paranormally inclined teens]. I came to this realization that all the characters are sort of straddling two worlds. They're straddling the spirit world that they dabble in a lot, and then just reality. ... At that age, especially in middle school, you're half in childhood, you're half in adulthood, you're half a student, you're half a friend. Like you're really figuring out all the different yous, and there are a lot of them.

Q: It strikes me that a lot of what you’re saying is universal no matter how old you are.

A: I'm still trying to figure it out. ... And then you put being a female and aging onto it and that brings you right back to those middle school feelings of, can I be accepted enough? What's happening to me? Changes to your body when you're 50 and changes to your body when you're 13 are changes to your body. And it's an identity shift, and it's what are people going to think of me with these changes? What do I think of me with these changes? Do I recognize myself? We just go through the same things over and over again at different ages, but it doesn't mean that we've got it all sorted.

Q: A few years ago, you created a Drama-Free Friend workshop for tweens that is “half-summer camp, half-therapy,” with your friend Amy Neufeld, a licensed marriage and family therapist. What does it mean to be a drama-free friend? 

A: It doesn’t mean not having drama, it means knowing how to handle it when you do. ... We're all going to have drama. We're all going to offend each other. We're all going to be offended. We can't avoid that. That's like saying, “I'm gonna make you happy all the time.” You can't avoid unhappiness, but you can have tools that you can use to get you out of it when you're in it.

Q: The workshops involve art, glitter and acting out scenarios that might be sources of drama, for example, the classic experience of not being invited to “the thing.” 

A: We have to be okay with not being invited to everything. We can be hurt, but we have to be able to recover from that. So how are you going to recover? What are some tools you could use to get you out of those horrible feelings? You're entitled to the feelings and this person's entitled to not inviting you. What are you going to do? How are we going to get you out of it?

Q: What’s your advice for parents trying to help their kids navigate one of these moments? 

A: We don't speak in platitudes and bumper stickers and those wooden plaques that tell you like ‘Everything's fabulous’ that you get at TJ Maxx. [Say] "That feels bad. I get it." Hard stop. Don't mention your own experience when it happened to you in middle school. Nobody cares. You were never a kid. You did not exist before this moment as a parent. Just hear them. "Yes. That is awful. That really sucks." Acknowledge it is the first step. And not try to sweep it away.

Then pivot: "What can you do to feel better right now?" Let's have a list of things that we like to do that make us feel better, activities that you love. Always have another friend group. ... Don't just have one group that you rely on all the time. Have different hobbies, and make sure that you're reaching out to all these different people. So if one thing feels yucky, you've got another thing.

This is one thing that I did always tell my kids: If you're not invited to the party, host the party next time. ... Don't like hate host and revenge host, where you're like, "Well, you didn't invite me. I'm not gonna invite you." But create your own fun. You don't have to keep waiting to be included. You can start the thing yourself.”