“Pressures on young girls are more than intense than ever,” best-selling author Claire Messud says in our interview about her new novel "The Burning Girl."“The complexities of puberty and the ways in which girls are still perceived in society as objects….is very real.” Best friends Julia and Cassie struggle through that ‘coming-of-age’ moment and the complicated loss of their intimacy in "The Burning Girl." Messud writes about longing and the quiet subtexts when friendships go awry better than any writer I know. As in her previous book "The Woman Upstairs," Messud’s books don’t present neat answers. “We don’t really have the consolation of order and resolution in real life,” she told me. “Why should we have it in fiction?”
