Book Review: My girls: The power of friendship in a fractured world

My girls chronicles the late high school and early college years of nine teenage girls who live in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. The book is based on four years of extensive fieldwork that Jasmin Sandelson conducted during her doctoral studies in sociology at Harvard University. In 2012, Sandelson lived across the street from the public housing building where all but one of the girls lived. With the girls’ permissions and her proximity, Sandelson was able to spend time with them after school, at weekend parties, and even vacations. Through this methodological approach, Sandelson captures the pivotal role friendships play as these girls each navigate family conflict, romantic relationships, college anxieties, and the heartbreaking tragedies that can accompany life in lower-income neighborhoods. Sandelson refers to the girls’ face-to-face interactions as their “offline” support. Her work, however, also documents how social media conferred “online” support to these girls, providing a counterargument to the prevailing negative associations between adolescent mental health and social media.

Central to the book's theme is that friendships between marginalized teen girls are essential sources of care, identity, strength, and resistance. Most of the girls are Black and the majority are either immigrants or daughters of immigrants. While highlighting their loyalty to each other, their emotional strength, and their academic achievements, Sandelson effectively portrays how the girls are unavoidably shaped by factors of race, class, immigrant status, policing, and economics.

Methodologically, Sandelson's approach includes in-depth interviews, participant observation, and informal interactions. Over the years, Sandelson clearly develops a deep and respectful relationship with the girls in this book. She addresses her status as a white, middle-class British woman who is five years their senior with transparency. Sandelson acknowledges her inability to be entirely objective and impartial to the experiences she was privileged to share with the girls. As Sandelson chronicles the girls’ experiences through richly detailed vignettes, she takes great care to respectfully convey their voices, allowing them to narrate their own stories and articulate the value and importance of their friendships in their own words. This attentiveness to how stories are presented strengthens the book's credibility and integrity.

My girls is well organized and accessible to a broad audience. The book is structured into three parts. The first, Friends and Forms of Care, examines how the girls provide each other with emotional and material support. The second section, Friendships Under Threat, reveals the ways in which these intimate friendships buoy the girls through violent neighborhood events, including murder. Here, the girls’ use and strength of on- and offline social supports is portrayed as they move to comprehend and cope with crises. In the final section, After Graduation, Sandelson chronicles each girl's adventure as she prepares and applies for college, navigates to her respective campus, and faces the challenge of managing life without her long-time “chosen kinship”.

In the second section, Sandelson provides a detailed and nuanced view on the role social media plays in these girls’ day-to-day lives. Against a backdrop of growing data on the negative effects of social media, she documents how the girls in her book use public posts on Twitter and Facebook to publicly praise and support each other, show solidarity, and generally hold one another up during moments of doubt and grief. Sandelson, however, also exposes the complexity of online self-presentation, highlighting the need to interpret all social media posts as curated and potentially performative (e.g., when one of the girls proclaims sobriety in person, yet posts photos of herself drinking). The vignettes in this section highlight the potentially beneficial and sometimes contradictory nature of using social media to achieve social support.

The book aims to challenge the academic and social narrative that girls growing up in poorer neighborhoods are more at-risk for deviant behaviors, particularly from their peers, than their white, middle class peers. Sandelson contends that the major contribution of her book is to respond to a “dearth” of research on urban Black girls. However, her supporting literature relies heavily on older work that does largely portray peers as risk factors for delinquent behaviors, and overlooks more recent research on risk, resiliency, and positive youth development. For social workers who adhere to a strengths-based perspective, view humans as resilient, and consider relationships as vital to well-being, the notion that young Black girls living in public housing depend deeply on their friendships – even more than their family or romantic relationships – may not be a revelation.

Regardless of My girls's contribution to sociology or ethnographic research, Sandelson's most valuable offering to her readers may come when she simply says, “The chapters that follow describe what the girls taught me” (p. xiii). Nothing more. She goes on to say that the book does not “tell their ‘story’ [because] the girls have many stories, and they can speak for themselves” (p. xiii). By aiming to be nothing more than a sharing of what the girls taught her, Sandelson reminds us that documenting what one has learned through careful and respectful observation of others can be a meaningful contribution in itself.