"See All the Stars"

Kit Frick is a novelist, poet, and MacDowell Colony fellow. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, she studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from Syracuse University. When she isn’t putting complicated characters in impossible situations, Frick edits poetry and literary fiction for a small press, edits for private clients, and mentors emerging writers through Pitch Wars. Her newly released debut young adult novel is See All the Stars, and her debut full-length poetry collection is A Small Rising Up in the Lungs (New American Press, fall 2018).

Frick applied the Page 69 Test to See All the Stars and reported the following:

On page 69 of See All the Stars—a YA contemporary thriller written in two interwoven timelines—Ellory is on the cusp of meeting up with her best friend Ret, with whom she’s had a rather epic falling out. As she makes her way to their meeting spot at the river, Ellory reflects on the months since their friendship fell apart: her suspension from school, time spent away from their Harrisburg hometown, time spent in therapy. And the progress she hasn’t really made. This page gets at the heart of two of the book’s core themes: loss and toxic friendships.

For four months, I clung to therapy like a lifeline. Dr. Marsha was the only person I could really talk to, the only one who never judged, never tried to scrub me clean with pitying looks … I wasn’t magically cured, but I was managing the cocktail of emotions she called ‘an experiential sense of loss.’ I was coping.

Then I returned to Pine Brook. Then Ret sat across from me in AP English like everything was totally normal. Then I knew that everything I thought I’d worked through in therapy was a giant, glaring lie. Hi, my name is Ellory. I’ve been lying to myself.

See All the Stars is about losing the people who were once your entire world and about figuring out how to move on. It’s also about friendships—and what happens when they become toxic. Friendships between women in adolescence and early adulthood are rarely simple. They’re intense—intensely good, intensely close, intensely consuming, intensely critical, intensely imbued with meaning, intensely fraught with the trappings of personal identity formation and navigating an often unforgiving social world. Ellory and Ret shared a deeply intense—and not always healthy—friendship, and now that it’s over, Ellory has to figure out how to forgive herself for her role in what happened, which isn’t easy. Meeting up with Ret in this scene is one of her first steps in that direction, but she has a long, twisty road ahead.

Visit Kit Frick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue