All That Glitters: On The Clique Novels and My First Lessons in White Privilege

While kids my age were falling in love with the fantastical, I did not. I wanted to read about rich white girls behaving badly.

Children’s books have always accounted for a significant corner of the literary world, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s—my elementary school years—children’s literature was a golden age, especially for fantasy series. The Harry Potter series became so popular the New York Times had to create a separate bestseller list for children’s books and then another one for children’s series. The Percy Jackson series (and subsequent spin-off) was such a massive success that in 2011, Disney had to print three million first-run copies—more than any book in the company’s history—of one of the books just to keep up with demand. And though The Chronicles of Narnia were originally published in the fifties, the early aughts Disney film adaptation remains one of the one hundred highest grossing films of all time and brought a whole new legion of young readers to the genre.

While many kids my age were falling in love with the fantastical, I did not. I totally missed the Harry Potter craze, and I’m still not sure what Percy Jackson’s deal was, or how exactly one gets to Narnia. Instead, my books of choice were fantasies of another kind: books about lives so unlike my own that they, in their own way, resembled the Narnias and the Hogwarts and the Camp Half-Bloods.

I wanted to read about rich white girls behaving badly.

If it was about wealthy white girls and their antics, I was reading it. And so were all my friends. Series like Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar, The A-List by Zoey Dean, Private by Kate Brian, and Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard, but above all, The Clique by Lisi Harrison.

I no longer remember what led me to first pick up The Clique, but I know I was hooked immediately. Massie Block, the queen bee and protagonist of the series, was a legend in my eyes. She was headstrong, knew what she wanted, and would never back down from a fight. She was also filthy rich, and occasionally a cruel bully, but that was simply part of the fun. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. This portrayal of teen girlhood that seemed so far from my life and the girls around me was a global hit. As of 2009, in The Clique’s heyday, the series had sold seven million copies worldwide, had produced seventeen books, and was primed to release a highly anticipated spin-off series.

At the height of The Clique’s popularity, my life was quite different from Massie’s. While Massie had a live-in housekeeper named Inez, rode to school in a Range Rover driven by her personal chauffeur, and lived in a massive mansion in Westchester, I was experiencing upheaval that was rapidly changing the life I’d always known. When the first book was published in 2004, I was entering the sixth grade, and my single mom had just quit her job as a social worker to attend law school full-time. Suddenly, with my mom less available than she’d always been, I was taking on more responsibilities around the house, learning how to cook for myself and clean, and walking home from school on my own with my first Nokia phone in my pocket in case of emergencies. No Range Rover or personal chauffeur to be found.

I wanted to read about rich white girls behaving badly.

I was also lying about where I lived. When my mom and I moved to Long Island from Queens, she found us an apartment, but she didn’t like the school district our new home put me in. So we used my aunt’s address to get me into a better (whiter) school district where my cousin also went to school. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers and couldn’t tell my friends the truth about my home, which only became more difficult as I got older and my friends and I started making our own plans, without our parents. Though I understood the need for secrecy, it made me feel separate from and jealous of my friends who would invite me over to their homes with ease.

However, even the lives my friends were living were nothing compared to The Clique. These books were like stepping into another world. In their world, they could talk back to their parents without getting into trouble. They could ask for things like a cell phone or throw massive birthday parties with goody bags filled with the hottest new accessories. They could shop excessively with their parent’s credit cards, break into the neighboring boys’ school to spy on their crushes, and even get expelled briefly, with no lasting repercussions, a luxury I never had.

In my world, there was no space to be a Black girl who talked back to her parents or got kicked out of school only to return to play on the school’s soccer team. I was raised to always be respectful, do well in school, and not get into trouble. What my mother understood and I didn’t was that Black girls are not given the same level of grace white girls are. We’re not given grace at all. One slipup for us can mean being labeled as angry or a troublemaker. Even though I didn’t really understand it, I felt it when I was in school. Teachers liked me more when I got straight As and said I had an attitude if I disagreed with something they said in class. 

Once I got in trouble for just reading a book during orchestra, even though I didn’t have a part to play and was bored. If I messed up or I made a mistake, it was not easily forgotten or forgiven, and the pressure of always having to be good weighed on me. Reading The Clique alleviated some of that. Through these characters, I got to slip into a world where girls could be bad without any of the consequences. It was pure escapism, and that’s what made me fall in love with them. It was also why I never took them seriously.

In The Clique, the Pretty Committee—the group of girls at the center of the books—was made up of Massie Block, the alpha; Alicia Rivera, the beauty queen; Dylan Marvil, Massie’s right-hand girl; Kristen Gregory, the tomboy; and Claire Lyons, the new girl. Throughout the series, the girls constantly fought over everything from boys to clothes to lip gloss. Massie, as the alpha of their group, often kicked out members of the Pretty Committee on a whim and new groups would be formed (like Alicia’s Soul M8s, which included boys—very scandalous). They would throw digs at each other, belittling one another for their fashion faux pas and physical appearances, while also looking down on themselves. Dylan, for instance, was often concerned about her weight because she was a size six and Massie was embarrassed by her lack of kissing experience.

Despite all this, at the core of The Clique was a group of girls who even amid all the drama always remained friends—especially when faced with a greater enemy like Alicia’s cousin Nina or boys infiltrating their school. In the end, the Pretty Committee was only split for good because of circumstances outside of the girls’ control. Massie’s dad got a new job that led her family to move to England, and Alicia finally became the alpha she had always wanted to be in Massie’s place. Then, they all lived happily ever after in high school. Or so I assume.

As the series ended with the girls heading into high school, I was graduating from mine. A lot has changed since then. I no longer read books about rich white girls and their problems (though I do watch Succession, which is basically the same thing except Logan Roy is the alpha and his children are the Pretty Committee). I still live with my mom, but we’ve since moved to Brooklyn and into a home she owns. Even though we’re certainly not living like the Pretty Committee, we’re definitely way better off now than we were when I read The Clique, which makes me wonder if it would be as much of an escape for me now as it was back then.

I began thinking about this more last year. In an attempt to find a new way to stay connected during the ongoing pandemic, a friend—who is also a Black woman—and I decided to reread Gossip Girl, but we didn’t make it very far into the series before we had to call it quits. As adults, we realized this series that we loved as kids did not hold up. The writing—which was often plotted by committee and then penned by a revolving door of ghostwriters—was worse than we remembered, and there were so many problematic plot points (Jenny’s entire arc in the series was about having big boobs for a freshman, being assaulted by Chuck, and then going “crazy” because she fell in love with Nate) that if the books were published today, the author would probably be canceled. Though the books had, at one point, been a major part of our lives, we agreed the books were best left in the past.

Black girls are not given the same level of grace white girls are. We’re not given grace at all.

A few months later, that same friend sent me a New York Times article on that era of books—particularly The Clique series. It’d been more than fifteen years since I’d read The Clique, and the things I was most interested in reading back then couldn’t have felt further away. I’d begun working in children’s publishing, often advocating for more diverse narratives that are a far cry from the rich-white-girl stories of my childhood. But my friend’s bewilderment at the piece (“I can’t believe this is a real article,” she’d texted) made me curious to see what someone had to say about the series that had meant so much to me back then. Lena Wilson’s article “How the Clique Books Taught Me to Hate Other Girls and Myself” critiques the series for prompting materialism, diet culture, bullying among girls, and jump-starting Wilson’s fixation on how the other half lives. She also notes how Harrison intended the series to be a critique on bullying and elitism but completely missed the mark, a point I must agree with.

Still, I ended up agreeing with my friend. I couldn’t believe it was a real article either. When I think back to reading The Clique books, all I can remember is how much my friends and I loved them. I imitated Massie’s “In” and “Out” lists in my own journal and slipped the Pretty Committee’s acronyms and witty comebacks into my vernacular the same way other kids would say muggle or “You shall not pass.”

In my reading experience, the books were fun, not harmful. But, as I read about Wilson’s experience and saw the many comments and tweets from other women who agreed with her, it made me question how our relationship to these books could be so different. The answer was obvious: Although Wilson was a scholarship student at a private school and not as wealthy as Massie and her friends, she was also white and therefore much closer to these girls’ worldview than I ever could be.

Everything about The Clique books was centered in whiteness. The girls’ ideas of cool clothes were Jimmy Choos and Moschino miniskirts, but in my community, you were cool if you had a Rocawear jacket, Apple Bottom jeans, and Jordans. Their methods of beauty care, like using creams to ensure they didn’t get wrinkles, were also vastly different from mine, and other than maybe trying lip gloss, I knew their tips weren’t applicable to my dark skin (Black don’t crack). As for the cattiness, their jokes seemed harmless to me in comparison to the racist comments I would hear about my hair (“It’s like a Brillo pad”) and my skin tone (“You’d get lost at night”).

For myself, and many of the other Black girls who fell in love with The Clique, as well as Gossip Girl and The A-List, these books weren’t aspirational because aspirations of whiteness were futile. No matter what we did, we could never be white and have the privilege that comes along with that. I realized early on, whether consciously or otherwise, that attempting to be Massie, Alicia, Dylan, Kristen, or even Claire was pointless. The Clique simply provided a peek into a world that was so far removed from our own it might as while have been a fantasy.

Now, as I work in and around children’s books that elevate marginalized voices and shine a light on characters a bit closer to the girl I was in middle school, I often wonder how my adolescent reading tastes may have differed if I had the kinds of children’s books that I work on now. Would I still have loved The Clique, and all my other faves, if there were more options? Would I have felt so seen that I no longer needed the escapist fantasy that those rich-white-girl stories provided? Would I have also adopted the kinds of characteristics from the books I was reading that Wilson mentions in her article?

I’m not sure. I do know, though, that the person I am today would not love The Clique the way I did back then. Even so, the series, along with Gossip Girl and all the others, provided a necessary escape for my younger self and also sustained my love for reading until I discovered more books where I could see myself. I’ll always be grateful to them for that, no matter their faults.