The devastating afterlife of a childhood friendship

David FreeNovember 5, 2026 — 12:12pmHelena Fox is the author of two previous novels, both written for young adults, and both impressively laurelled with literary prizes. Her debut, How It Feels to Float, won the Prime Minister’s young adult literature prize in 2020. Her follow-up, The Quiet and the Loud, won a NSW Premier’s Award in 2024.Loneliness is a Molecule is Fox’s first novel for adults, although it does have a young adult as its protagonist. The novel is narrated in the first person by 18-year-old Miri, who spends most of the story’s 300 pages processing a trauma inflicted on her by Caleb, her one-time childhood best friend.In Fox’s novel, Miri and Caleb’s friendship begins in kindergarten.Getty ImagesMiri and Caleb’s story begins in kindergarten, when they’re both five. For a while, Caleb seems like the ideal best friend. He’s kind, articulate and sensitive. “When I’m with Caleb,” the young Miri thinks, “I feel like I’m a thousand feet tall.”When Miri and Caleb enter adolescence, intimations of romance creep into their friendship. They kiss, and Miri doesn’t mind that. “It feels like something good,” she thinks, “a beginning.”Then a night comes when Caleb puts his hands all over her, and doesn’t stop, even when Miri tells him “no”. Afterwards, he promises he’ll never do it again. But then he does do it again, repeatedly.Novelist Helena Fox.Gracie DelaneyFor Miri, the effect of these assaults is seismic. Caleb hasn’t just violated her physically. He’s trashed a friendship that was the most important thing in her life. Part of her hates him. Another part of her wants the friendship back.As Miri tries to keep her head above these choppy psychological waters, events around her accelerate. Caleb is accused of raping another local girl; the police become involved; the small-town gossip mill kicks into overdrive.Then Caleb suddenly dies, perhaps by suicide. His death deepens Miri’s malaise. While he was alive, she’d been able to imagine that their story wasn’t entirely over. Now that he’s gone, she’s left alone to sort through the wreckage of her grief and rage – and, perhaps, lingering love.She goes to university, but struggles there. Offered the chance to house-sit for a family friend in Rome, she takes it. The final two-thirds of the novel are set in Italy, where Miri gradually – very gradually – emerges from under the heel of her trauma. Photo: In the book’s acknowledgments, Fox reveals that she herself is “a victim-survivor of sexual abuse”. Although the novel isn’t strictly autobiographical, it draws heavily on Fox’s personal experiences.The novel doesn’t offer any false consolation. It doesn’t pretend that a trauma like Miri’s can be overcome easily, if indeed it can ever be overcome at all. This unremitting honesty is the novel’s strength, but also its weakness. This is a story about a character who feels trapped in her own head, and there are times when the reader feels trapped in there too.Possibly, Fox would have been better off writing the novel in the third person, to give her readers some breathing space. No doubt the book’s account of post-traumatic depression is grimly authentic. But it’s hard for a reader to want to keep going back to a story whose narrator is, by her own account, incapable of feeling much at all. She can’t laugh, can’t enjoy food or human company, can’t “remember ever feeling good”.Still, one reason we read fiction is to be put inside the heads of people other than ourselves. Fox’s novel certainly does that. It takes us deep into the world of private devastation that abusers leave behind them, in which the only closure available is to accept that closure will never come, and that the past will always be present, no matter how much you wish it wasn’t.Loneliness is a Molecule by Helena Fox is published by Picador ($33).What else is happening in the book world?Dolly Alderton on writing a new adaptation of Pride and PrejudiceMarlon James’ Booker-nominated novel is a polyphonic epicPulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver on her new novel and Appalachian prideHe lasted 11 days in Trump’s White House. Now the Mooch has a warningThe Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every FridayMore:ReviewFor subscribersSpectrumLiteratureSpectrumFrom our partners