women’s fiction | Sharon Overend

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March 18, 2026 · 9:21 am

Writing about Grown‑Up Friendships

Strong friendships can increase your lifespan by up to 50%, lower your stress levels, and reduce your risk of depression, high blood pressure, and even chronic illnesses.

All good, yeah. Who doesn’t want to be healthier?

When we’re younger, friends just… happen. You sit beside someone in class, or you share a shift at a terrible job, or you bond over the fact that you both survived the same haircut trend. But in middle age, friendship is a choice. A deliberate, hopeful, slightly vulnerable choice.

We’re all wandering around with our emotional tote bags full of past friendships, heartbreaks, and half‑finished self‑help books, hoping to stumble into someone who gets our jokes and doesn’t judge our YouTube feed.

Middle‑age friendships skip the performance. There’s no pretending to be cooler, calmer, or more put together than you are. Everyone is too tired for that. You show up as your real self — the one who has opinions about laundry detergent and about how over the speed limit is too over the speed limit.

Adult friendship is built on tiny, ridiculous moments:

The shared eye roll across a crowded room
The “tell me everything” voice note
The way they know your coffee order, your coping mechanisms, and your favourite band from back in the day
The fact that they’ve seen you cry, laugh‑snort, and rage‑clean

There’s something beautifully hopeful about new friendships — the idea that even now, even with all the history and heartbreak and hard‑won wisdom we carry, there are still people out there who will get us. Who will laugh with us. Who will sit beside us in the messy middle of life and say, “Same.”

But building and maintaining new friendships at a time in life when everyone is juggling careers, kids, aging parents, existential dread, and the sudden realization that staying up past 10 p.m. now requires a recovery period is a big ask — a next‑level commitment.

Worth it? Absolutely.

I’ve had the great fortune in middle age to have met and curated some of the most meaningful friendships of my life. These connections — the ones that feel earned and carry an emotional honesty that only shows up once you’ve lived long enough to stop pretending — are what drew me to writing about friendships.

Writing about adult friendships means writing characters who bond over shared exhaustion, mutual grievances, and complicated backstories. As a writer, I’m juggling characters with decades of personality quirks, emotional scar tissue, and the hilarious reality that grown‑ups can absolutely form a lifelong bond over one good conversation in a parking lot. These relationships are messy, layered, and wildly relatable.

In the end, I write about adult friendships because they’re the real plot twist of middle age — the unexpected relationships that sneak in, shake things up, and prove we’re not done growing yet.

Here’s to the brave, awkward, hilarious act of making new friends in the middle of life. And to telling their stories!

Sticking Like Glue

The sun poked through a lush tree canopy, a chipmunk scurried across the deck, cicada buzzed, and waves lapped lazily onto the beach. I stared out from the screened in gazebo and knew I was in my nirvana. So why—not for the first time—did I want to hurl myself off the dock and sink to the bottom of the lake? Simple. Because my characters were throwing tantrums, and my story had decided to ditch me and take a hike down a dark, windy, dead-end alley. You might say, all a bit much. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t write a book. What a world class idiot I was to assume once I’d landed on MY story, that the cosmos would fall in line, and the most brilliant words the world had ever read would float like motes in a sunbeam onto the page. WRONGO.

That afternoon, I did the only thing I could do. I sent out an SOS. Cryssa, my friend and a fellow writer, knew all about chasing wayward characters down dark alleys.

Hey, girl. Hate to bug, just wondering, you still got that lifeline handy?

Took some doing, but she got me out of the reeds and safely back on dry land.

Take a break. Go for a walk. Things ’ill look different when you get back.

I did, and they did.

For real, a shift had happened. I returned to a scene that suddenly clicked, and characters who’d wandered back. Oh, and they had a story to tell me. Yeah, that was the thing. They spoke, and I listened instead of the other way around.

I got through that day, but I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t the first, nor the last time I felt overwhelmed by this story and figured I’d be doing the world a favour if I just quit. But here’s the thing, I’m a stubborn mule—also I grew up with a mom who never let me quit anything I ever started—so I stuck to it. I continued to write, and to workshop, and to edit, and to edit, and to edit, until my characters told me they were done talking.

Fast forward to today. I’m here in a different gazebo, staring at the cover for my debut novel, Look Over Your Shoulder—pre-order e-book now : https://books2read.com/u/bzGr7z Print version available October 21, 2025, just saying—and feeling pretty proud of myself. It’s happening. Woot!

Moral of the story? The highs and lows of this journey were monumental, but they do say, it’s not the destination, rather the journey that matters. True that. Along the way, I learned how to write. I learned how to give and receive critiques. I learned fear and disappointment are part of the process, for sure, but they’re not good enough excuses to quit. I found my tribe, and I found my voice. Oh, and I decided that writing was easy peazy—not!

And ya know what—I’ma gonna do it all again.

Tag Archives: women’s fiction

Writing about Grown‑Up Friendships

Sticking Like Glue

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