When I wrote my debut novel Paradise Pawn, I was two years out of college, living in New York City, and clinging to my friends with everything I had. My friends were my reason for living. No boyfriend, job, apartment, or accomplishment came close to giving me the joy my friends gave me.
Whenever I felt one of my friends changing, I panicked. I worried that any change in my friends’ lives could mean the loss of our connection. Whenever I left a particularly fun party, on the train ride home, I would make everyone promise that the party would become a tradition. I had to believe we would recreate the exact same party the next year, and the next year, and the next, to keep from being distraught that it had ended. Talk of babies or husbands or houses in the future made me angry. Couldn’t my friends see that the connections we had were all we needed—forever?
It felt too embarrassing and vulnerable to write about these feelings I was having as a twenty-three-year-old, so I chose to put the feelings into a book about teenage girls and their anxieties about friendship. That book, Paradise Pawn, is a story about two fourteen-year-old girls on the brink of a friendship breakup. The narrator, Jackie, is desperate to stop her best friend, Kayla, from growing out of their friendship.
It’s a story for adults about teenagers, and that made it a hard sell. Agents asked, “Why isn’t it Young Adult fiction?” I had a hard time answering this question. I wasn’t entirely comfortable explaining that I had created the book by transposing my feelings as an adult (albeit a twenty-three-year-old adult) onto teenage characters, because I was embarrassed by how tightly I was clinging to my friends.
For eight years, Paradise Pawn languished on my laptop. Every once in a while, I gave it a big edit and tried to send it out as a YA book again, but it never quite resonated with YA editors. Then, one night when I was scrolling on Instagram, I saw that Tin House was running a contest for unpublished manuscripts. I hastily dug through my computer and found the old, original version of Paradise Pawn—the one I had written in a twin bed in Morningside Heights after late nights with friends, feeling preemptively nostalgic for the life I was living. I sent the manuscript to Tin House, not expecting much. But then, a few weeks later, I was on a Zoom call with one of their editors, pinching myself as she told me they wanted to buy Paradise Pawn.
I was then faced with editing my moody twenty-three-year-old self’s writing through the lens of my moody thirty-one-year-old self. I felt like I was reading a journal that only I knew was a journal. I remembered specific moments that fueled the friendship anxiety in Paradise Pawn—times when I could feel friends changing, which made me worry we wouldn’t stay friends.
As I reread the words I had written when I was twenty-three, I realized something surprising and beautiful. Nearly all the people I was worried about losing while writing Paradise Pawn are still a huge part of my life eight years later. I am closer to almost all of them than I was in our twenties. My friends have had babies, lost parents, started companies, defended PhD dissertations, gotten married, gotten divorced, and more.
I have moved to Vermont. I have rethought my career. I’ve had breakups. I’ve published a book. Through all these changes, my friends are still my friends. They showed up at my book tour stops across the country. Their names are in the acknowledgments of my book. I know my friends and I are still very young, but we are older than we were at twenty-three. Our faces and bodies have changed. Some of our core beliefs have changed. The way we host parties has changed. But something deep inside us has also remained the same.
I wish I could go back and tell my twenty-three-year-old self that she doesn’t need to cling so desperately to her friends. But, if anyone had told her that, she probably would not have believed them, and she might not have written Paradise Pawn.
This summer, I’ve noticed that Paradise Pawn is in good company with several beautifully written new books about teenage girls for adults—Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash and Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman, to name a few. I would like to think that maybe these books, and Paradise Pawn, are resonating with adults because of something inside us all that remains the same no matter what age we are.
Maybe that something is also what has helped me stay connected to my friends for all these years, and what will keep me connected to them for years to come.
Meg Richardson is the author of the debut novel Paradise Pawn (Tin House / Zando).
FICTION
By Meg Richardson
Tin House
Published July 14, 2026
