Bad Asians Author Lillian Li Chats Why Friendship Breakups Hurt So Much

Friendship breakups can linger longer than romantic ones, yet they’re rarely given the same emotional weight. In Bad Asians, Lillian Li explores the quiet devastation of losing friends you once thought would be in your life forever. Following four childhood best friends whose bond fractures under the pressures of a hyper-competitive community, the 2008 financial crisis, and diverging values, the novel examines how those ruptures echo for years. Here, Lillian reflects on the real-life stories that inspired Bad Asians and why friendship heartbreak deserves to be taken just as seriously as any love story.

Guest post written by Lillian Li, author of Bad Asians.

Almost everyone has at least one friendship breakup they still think about. I know I do, and maybe you do too. When I realized there weren’t many books out there that looked closely at friendship, I wrote BAD ASIANS, which follows a group of four best friends from childhood and how the pressures of their hyper-competitive community, the financial crisis of 2008, and their own diverging values leads to a massive rupture in their friend group, one that affects them for years after.

What I found most interesting about writing this book, however, was what would happen when I told people about the project. People were eager not only to read this story of friendship heartbreak, but also to share their own story with me. I started to interview some of them to understand why these friendship breakups stick around so long, sometimes longer even than our romantic ones.

I talked to people as young as twenty-two and as old as eighty-eight. I talked to the breaker-upper and the broken-up-with, and even one person who was neither but still had his entire friend group fall apart as collateral damage. Their stories contain incredible details—a near-death experience, a housing cooperative’s drug-fueled parties, a summer camp with no adults, a betrayal after a psychedelic ritual—but each is grounded by a sense of loss.

The thread connecting these stories, each so different from one another, is that what has left them reeling is the mystery of why these endings happened, and why they still hurt so bad. Maybe it’s because we never think of friendships as ending? Maybe it’s because we choose our friendships, which means the decision to unfriend is that much more intentional? Maybe it’s because there’s something shameful about a friend breakup, as if it’s a comment on your own character; or something juvenile, as if it’s something you should get over already. At the very least, I think it’s because there’s no space to talk about these breakups, and so we suffer in silence.

I think this in part because, through these shared stories, and writing Bad Asians, I felt my own heart mend. The friendship breakups I’d carried lost their sting, their shame. I finally had proof that we are as shaped by these heartbreaks as any other, and even if it’s natural that people grow up and grow apart, it doesn’t make it any less devastating. As one person told me, “When I’m really at my limit and I’m just having a dark night of the soul, I start thinking, am I really just a terrible person who’s unworthy of friendship because of this one friendship that went wrong, despite all of the friendships that went right?”

I wrote Bad Asians to understand what keeps a friendship together and what makes it fall apart, and in doing so I was finally able to treat friendship with the drama and significance of a romance, of any important, life-changing, soul-shaping relationship in your life. And while my book might not answer the question of why a friendship ends, or how we might find our way back together again, I hope it will make you feel less alone in asking that question.

Bad Asians by Lillian Li is out February 12 (Pushkin Press).