"'Bee Season' Author Returns: A 'False Friend' Atones" from NPR's Arts & Life

Recent headlines remind us of the tragic consequences of bullying. Mean girls have tormented other girls for generations. (Ditto boys.) Myla Goldberg's intriguing new novel adds a retrospective twist to the problem. The False Friend is about a woman who heads back to her hometown to confess to perpetrating and then covering up a crime against another girl when they were both eleven. Goldberg, author of the 2000 bestseller Bee Season, begins her story with a blast of memory. Celia sees a red VW bug and imagines she hears the familiar, long-forgotten voice of her childhood best friend Djuna. In memory she is transported back to age eleven, when, after a raging argument, the two of them led their clique of five girls in a forbidden walk home through the woods in upstate New York. In an episode Celia's memory has blanked out until this moment, she recalls seeing Djuna fall into a hole, and leaving her there, telling no one.

Read an excerpt of the book, here. Read the full NPR Arts & Life feature here. See also: The False Friend, Wickett's Remedy: A Novel, Catching The Moon