When Your Job Turns You Into a Brand, You Need a Friend to Be Human With

Margie didn’t want to talk about the fancy stuff I was doing, and never tried to compete with me. She didn’t care about that stuff, wasn’t impressed.

Margaret: I think that is an advantage of being old. I finished my first manuscript, which wasn’t published yet, on my 40th birthday. And Veronica was sort of famous for having written the book in college.

Veronica: At another conference, in Kansas City, [Missouri], you invited me to dinner with a bunch of people. And this was before your book Icons came out.

Margaret: Beautiful Creatures, the series, was still rolling, but we were starting to write our own projects. Icons was the first book I wrote that didn’t hit the [best-seller] list.

Veronica: It’s hard to follow something that was big. We both know about that. The pressure is so high.

It was me at a dinner with a small group of people, and Margie started to cry. I think that’s when we became friends. She had been very supportive, in an older-person way, to me. But at that moment, I was like, Oh, I’m being treated as an equal and a friend. Not just the kid who got invited to dinner.

Margaret: I was the kindergartner, at that point, and you were the sixth grader. I think that is the hallmark of a really good friendship, when you have some sort of equality in terms of both offering and needing that emotional support. That’s even more complex when you have a little bit of a public-facing personality, or, in Veronica’s case, a lot of a public-facing personality. Frankly, not everything feels like a super real friendship.

One thing we’re great at is when the other person needs to disappear, [it’s okay]. We’ll reach out and be like, “I’m here, buddy. Are you coming up for air? Do you need something?” in the mental-health-sponsor way

Veronica: “This is your mental-health sponsor. Are you eating more than peanuts?”

Margaret: I do sometimes only eat peanuts.

Beck: How did you guys end up deputizing yourselves as each other’s mental-health sponsors? What does that actually look like, beyond peanut regulation?

Veronica: I don’t require peanut regulation, so that’s a bit one-sided.

Margaret: We’ve gotten strict with the protocol. For instance, on book tour I am always sobbing by day three. [Veronica will ask me,] “What are you doing to prepare to take care of yourself? Who is your safe person?”

Veronica: You were the one who was like, “Just take the fucking Klonopin before events, God.” But this aspect of the relationship came about because of the festivals [we run together].

Margaret: YALLFest is a young-adult festival that is in Charleston, [South Carolina]. We had no budget the first year. Every donor’s last name was Stohl. I remember being shocked when 100 people showed up. The last in-person festival we had was more than 30,000 people, and now there are two festivals—YALLFest and YALLWEST, which is in Santa Monica.