I grew up in a very small town: the kind of place where everyone knows everything about you, or thinks they do. A place where news travels quickly, and rumors travel faster. Where you have the same classmates from preschool through high school, and many of those classmates’ parents have known one another their whole lives too. It’s a place where neighbors look out for neighbors—and also have their eye on them.
Or so it felt to me as a teenager.
Being an adolescent is all about figuring out who you are and what you believe. But how do you grow into the person you want to be—how do you try out new versions of yourself and move on from things you’ve outgrown—when everyone around you still treats you like the person you were before?
For me, the answer was camp. Every summer, I escaped my normal life for a few blissful weeks, and made new friends who knew me only as the person I was in that place, in that moment. All they heard of my past were the stories I told them. All we were to one another was: everything.
These summer friendships were essential and intense. They allowed me to be what felt like the purest, truest version of myself, and the friendships themselves shaped who I was, both during the summer and after. Including one key friendship that turned out to be built on lies.
One of the themes I explore again and again in my writing is the depths and boundaries of essential and defining friendships, especially female friendships. Inspired by those summers where people who’d known me for so little time seemed to know me best, I wanted to probe the truth of that feeling. What does it mean to really know someone? How well can we even know ourselves? And does a friend who lies show us less or more of who she truly is through the stories she invents?
In Nobody Knows But You, a novel told in news clips, texts, a court transcript, social media posts, rumors, interviews, and unsent letters written by one friend to another in the aftermath of a summer cut short by murder, I dig into these questions. Some of the answers I found surprised me. Others thickened the plot. All of it was ridiculously fun to write.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
Anica Mrose Rissi is the author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including the Anna, Banana series; Love, Sophia on the Moon; and Always Forever Maybe. Her essays have been published by The Writer and the New York Times, and she plays fiddle in and writes lyrics for the band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves.