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" Friendships are rich territory for fiction and my personal thematic catnip. If I read a book jacket that says the word friendship, particularly if it&amp;#039;s got a female protagonist, I&amp;#039;m already halfway to loving the book. Next time you&amp;#039;re feeling nostalgic for your childhood BFF or that girl you adored in high school, or you just feel like falling into the story of two women not unlike you and your future maid of honor, check out these titles. They each capture the essence of friendships at different life stages. CHILDHOOD As a kid, I once built a fort with my neighbor in her backyard where we reigned over a menagerie of stuffed animals. I don&amp;#039;t remember what we called our kingdom, but it wasn&amp;#039;t much different from Terabithia, the imaginary sanctuary two friends create in Katherine Paterson&amp;#039;s incomparable novel The Bridge to Terabithia. Like Jesse and Leslie, my friend and I slipped in and out of the game whenever we felt like it \u2014 essentially, we lived halfway in an imaginary kingdom. The Bridge to Terabithia has one of the saddest endings I can think of, but the story also evokes that giddy, anything-is-possible-when-I&amp;#039;m-with-you feeling so well you&amp;#039;ll be glad, even while you&amp;#039;re sobbing hysterically, that you read it. PRETEEN In L.M. Montgomery&amp;#039;s Anne of Green Gables series, Anne and Diana coin the phrase &amp;quot;bosom friends&amp;quot; to describe their relationship. (Which honestly kind of weirded me out when I was a preteen and embarrassed by any word that correlated to a body part.) Their early devotion will be familiar to anyone who spent every weekend sleeping over at her best friend&amp;#039;s house. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll never have another bosom friend \u2014I don&amp;#039;t want to have. I couldn&amp;#039;t love anybody as I love you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh Diana,&amp;quot;cried Anne, clasping her hands, &amp;quot;do you love me?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Why, of course I do. Didn&amp;#039;t you know that?&amp;quot; In many ways, your preteen best friend is also your first love \u2014 there&amp;#039;s courtship and a promise (often including an exchange of jewelry!), though BFFs have a way better chance of lasting forever.  ADOLESCENCE I could write a whole post on all the awesome books about teenage friendship. But I want to spotlight My Brilliant Friend, by reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. The story is set in a small Italian village outside Naples, and it follows Lila and Elena from the beginnings of their friendship \u2014 playing with dolls, competing at school, terrifying each other with stories about neighborhood villains \u2014 to their late teen years, when their paths diverge. Though they&amp;#039;re both accepted into upper school, Lila can&amp;#039;t afford to go. She grows beautiful while working at her father&amp;#039;s cobbling business, her potential thwarted. Elena, meanwhile, suffers an awkward adolescence and is both tormented and inspired by her friend&amp;#039;s beauty and unquenchable intelligence. Ferrante captures the delicate blend of envy and loyalty that afflicts girls who see in each other everything they are not, and who, despite it all, share a fierce love. HIGH SCHOOL I&amp;#039;ve made high school a separate category from adolescence not just so I can include more worthy books, but also because high school can act as a kind of poison on even the closest friendships. In short, girls can be bitches, and if you didn&amp;#039;t learn that in grade school, there&amp;#039;s not a chance you&amp;#039;re getting out of high school without knowing that even the people you trust the most will occasionally stab you in the back. Megan Abbott&amp;#039;s Dare Me is the magnetic story of what happens to Addy and Beth&amp;#039;s friendship when the cheerleading squad they&amp;#039;re used to running gets a new coach. Abbott understands girls \u2014 she gets their sweetness, their complexity, and their ability to be completely vicious. COLLEGE Rainbow Rowell&amp;#039;s Fangirlopens with a rift between twin sisters Cath and Wren after Wren decides not to be Cath&amp;#039;s roommate their freshman year of college. The story of how these sisters (and lifelong BFFs) separate and then come together again is moving and authentic. Plus, Fangirl has extra bonus girl-friendship action \u2014 the scenes in which Cath befriends her new roommate, the caustic and LOL-funny Reagan, are as entertaining as they are recognizable. 20s Mary McCarthy&amp;#039;s The Group scandalized the world when it was published in the early &amp;#039;60s with its frank take on sex, marriage, breastfeeding and the horrors of early birth control (oh my god, you guys, PESSARIES). Cosmopolitan called it, &amp;quot;Juicy, shocking, witty and almost continually brilliant,&amp;quot; in one of its earliest reviews. The &amp;quot;group&amp;quot; is composed of eight Vassar grads tackling post-college life, and the novel weaves in and out of individual stories, so that the effect is a kind of collage. You see each girl through her own eyes and the group&amp;#039;s eyes, a narrative trick that underscores the permanent way college friends influence our identity. If The Group leaves you hankering for more, follow it up with J. Courtney Sullivan&amp;#039;s Commencement, a contemporary take on the same theme \u2014 except instead of Vassar, Sullivan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;group&amp;quot; graduated from Smith. There&amp;#039;s a scene in Emily Gould&amp;#039;s forthcoming novel, Friendship, that&amp;#039;s a straight-up echo of Anne and Diana&amp;#039;s pledge in Anne of Green Gables \u2014 except Gould&amp;#039;s take has a decidedly Girls-esque spin. Twentysomething Bev and Amy are sitting on the fire escape of Amy&amp;#039;s new apartment, drinking wine from paper cups, when Bev confesses that Amy is her &amp;quot;best friend.&amp;quot; The awkward tenderness of that moment, which will resonate with any girl who&amp;#039;s experienced the adult version of friend-courtship, sets the tone for this insightful book about female relationships and how they change as women approach their 30s. 30s Recently I&amp;#039;ve noticed a lot of my girlfriends talking about &amp;quot;cutting the fat&amp;quot; \u2014 severing their ties to friends, even close friends, because they no longer have anything in common with them, or because the friendship has grown toxic. Lucinda Rosenfeld is a biting novelist, and with I&amp;#039;m So Happy for You she shows what happens when friendship turns sour. Wendy is used to helping her longtime BFF Daphne clean up the crazy messes she makes of her life. But when Daphne starts to get her act together, Wendy can&amp;#039;t handle it and sets off on a destructive bender that threatens to tear them apart. If cattiness isn&amp;#039;t your bag, counter the bleakness with Sheila Heti&amp;#039;s How Should a Person Be?. This book has been classified as a fictional memoir, because it&amp;#039;s partially composed of real-life gchats and email exchanges between Heti and her BFF, Margaux Williamson, a visual artist. Though Heti&amp;#039;s novel tackles a ton of complicated and personal terrain \u2014 her shitty relationships with men, her artistic dreams and failures \u2014 it is, above all, a vivid and modern portrait of two women friends. Williamson and Heti aren&amp;#039;t just inseparable in normal BFF ways \u2014 they&amp;#039;re artists who share a passionate ambition for greatness in their respective fields. MARRIAGE The when of the marriage is less important than the who, andwhen I imagine my wedding, it&amp;#039;s my bridal party that I think of first. Why is it that marriage makes us want to reconnect with our closest girlfriends, even the ones we haven&amp;#039;t spoken to in years? In Judy Blume&amp;#039;s Summer Sister, Vix is the quiet, bookish sidekick to Caitlin&amp;#039;s dazzling firework of a personality, and the novel trails them through their summers together on Martha&amp;#039;s Vineyard. Years after they&amp;#039;ve grown apart, Caitlin asks Vix to be her maid of honor \u2014 and Vix says yes, even though she has a secret history with her friend&amp;#039;s fianc\u00E9. You&amp;#039;ll be riveted as both girls learn the extent of their capacity for betrayal and devotion. FOREVER AND EVER You&amp;#039;ve probably seen the AMAZING movie version of Beaches, starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. (If you haven&amp;#039;t, now you have Friday-night plans \u2014 order a pizza, call your best friend, and get nice and wine drunk while you guys scream-sing &amp;quot;The Wind Beneath Your Wings.&amp;quot;) The novel is even better. The story of Cee Cee and Bertie&amp;#039;s friendship, which spans 30 years of love affairs and jealousy, of closeness and distance, is a moving portrait of lifelong friendship. You already knew best friends can weather ups and downs, but Beaches is the perfect (and tear-jerky) reminder.  Related:  10 Books by Women You Have to Read This Spring 10 Things Books Taught Me About Relationships 8 Reasons Guys Who Read Make the Best Boyfriends Follow Julie on Twitter. Photo Credit: GalleryStock "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a5766/books-female-friendship/>