Unfriended

Unfriended is a 2014 middle grade fiction novel by Rachel Vail. It concerns the problems that emerge out of the combination of social media and digital communication within formal educational environments. Following a middle school-age protagonist named Truly and her classmates Clay, Hazel, Brooke, Natasha, and Jack, who deal with and actively enrich middle school chaos, it addresses the problem of bullying in young adult life. Rotating through multiple characters’ perspectives, the book is also a character study on how individuals in emotionally fraught periods of life try to rationalize their somewhat directionless identities.

The novel begins when sixth-grade Truly is trying to negotiate the complex emotional relationships that blossomed at the onset of middle school and puberty. Life at school isn’t helped by new middle school vocabulary, which welcomes constant insults such as “wannabe slut” and “raging bitch.” Two years later, when she turns 13, her parents give her a cell phone and approve access to social media. Truly is now known for excelling at school, seeming to be a seemingly perfect student and a kind of foil to her two siblings who live with disabilities. Part way through the school year, she resolves to leave her best friend Hazel, who is considered “uncool” at the school, and befriend the more popular Natasha, her former best friend who she lost two years before when Natasha became “cool.” Hazel, a smart, egotistical, quirky girl, denounces Truly at the same time, saying that the popular girls are beneath her and that she will never be Truly’s friend after being treated as disposable.

One week, Truly scores an invitation from Natasha to sit at the coveted “Popular Table” at lunch, ostensibly because the two girls plan to work on an assignment together. Having long dreamed of joining the popular kids, Truly doesn’t know how she got so lucky so suddenly. At first glance, everyone at the Popular Table seems to get along well and treat each other kindly. They post constantly to social media, curating their content to optimize their public images. Yet, Truly soon finds that her first impression was wrong, and she becomes entangled in webs of mistruths, arguments, insults, and bullying. The increasing connectivity of social media only exacerbates the spread and distortion of information, transcending the school building and its hours of operation. The characters have a hard time piecing together real pictures of who their friends are amid the confusion.



This distorted reality takes clear shape when Truly begins to successfully integrate into the popular clique. Remembering her days of being “uncool,” Natasha becomes paranoid that Truly is plotting to knock her from her high social position after Hazel, seeking revenge, plants a seed of doubt as to why Truly joined their clique. In an unlikely alliance, Natasha and Hazel both denounce Truly, disseminating rumors and criticisms about her on social media. Hazel hacks into Truly’s phone and makes self-deprecating posts. Meanwhile, Jack develops a huge crush on Truly, but Truly falls instead for a boy named Clay, who is the longtime friend of Brooke, the popular group’s informal leader. The characters are so obsessed over rationalizing their positions and actions that they fail to connect as peers, instead receding inward into highly curated digital shelters. At the same time, they are influenced by very disparate family lives, which further humanize their plights. Natasha is strongly influenced by her strict, bitter, controlling mother, who endowed her daughter with many insecurities including competitiveness and an unshakable obsession over being perceived as perfect. Perceiving Truly as a threat, Natasha makes disparaging posts on her own social media profiles. When the aftermath arrives, she tells everyone at school that Truly created them all.

By this time, most of Truly’s classmates have begun to doubt her trustworthiness. She starts to notice she has been unfriended on Facebook and has no idea how to salvage her evaporating social capital. The book leaves the question of Truly’s fate open. Most of the characters’ identities are left not fully resolved, their narratives and senses of self esteem still vulnerable to the constant chaos of middle school. Truly realizes she hates middle school and wishes she had not alienated most of her friends with a naive attempt to ascend the popularity ladder.

Unfriended is a comedic and dramatic meditation on the emotionally abusive nature of middle schoolers, presenting that time of life as a universal obstacle in which one does not get to choose one’s companions. Rather, the school hive mind ultimately chooses for you. Vail employs middle school vocabulary, references to pop culture, arguments drawn from experiences overheard in real life, and popular literary tropes such as the class struggle to depict middle school as a chaotic but necessary milestone to pass in one’s personal development.