One quality of strong storytelling, sometimes, is making the reader think “This could have been me”. That’s what Bad Friends is all about.
Toronto Star
$24.95 CAD/$21.95 USD
A story of the enduring quality of female friendship amid a gritty landscape of abuse
Pearl is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power structures: parents beat children, teachers beat students, older students beat younger students. But at each moment the duress verges on bleakness, Ancco pulls back with soft moments of friendship between Pearl and her best friend, Jeong-ae. What unfolds is a story of female friendship, a Ferrante-esque connection formed through youthful excess, malaise, and struggle that stays with the young women into adulthood.
Served by a dry and precise line, Bad Friends viscerally captures the adolescent years of two young women who want and know they deserve something different, but, ultimately, are unable to follow through. In a culture where young women are at a systemic disadvantage, Ancco creates a testimonial to female friendship as a powerful tool for survival. Pearl forgets her worst adolescent memories, but she cannot ever shake the memory of her friendship with Jeong-ae during her most tumultuous years.
Bad Friends is translated from Korean by Janet Hong, an award-winning writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her translations include Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale (Graywolf Press, 2017) and Ha Seong-nan’s The Woman Next Door (forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2019). She is currently long listed for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize.
Praise for Bad Friends
Ancco’s Bad Friends is the unforgettable story of a lost, pivotal friendship. I read it in a single sitting, thrilled by its power, ingenuity, and grace. I love this book.
R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
Stunning in its stark look at child abuse, and empathy for its characters, Ancco’s artfully told story grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go.
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
[Bad Friends] is a discovery... Don't miss this unique work.
Meg Lemke, PEN America
Bad Friends is an electrifying ode to the grit of adolescence and the way it gets trapped beneath your adult skin, grinding away at you decades after you've made your escape. A master renderer of aches and darknesses and bright, hot yearnings, Ancco explores friendship and intimacy in a way that make both feel bracingly new, and piercingly familiar. You'll find a piece of yourself in this book.
Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
