National Best Friends Day is June 8, and I want to be honest with you: the best friend in a romance novel has one of the hardest jobs in fiction.

She has to be funny enough to steal every scene she’s in without upstaging the heroine. She has to dispense wisdom that sounds like she’s making it up off the top of her head (because she is). She has to drag the protagonist toward her own happiness with varying degrees of subtlety and success. And she has to do all of this while also having her own problems, opinions, and a life that doesn’t revolve entirely around the main character’s love story. (That last part is the one most writers forget, which is why so many best friends in fiction feel like glorified plot devices in cute shoes.)

When a best friend character is written well, she’s the reason you keep reading between the romantic beats. She’s the one who shows up at the wrong moment with a bottle of wine and the exact right thing to say. She’s the friend who tells the heroine she’s being an idiot, with love and also with receipts. She sees the hero clearly before the heroine does. She sees the heroine clearly when the heroine absolutely cannot.

She is also, for my money, the character readers most frequently want their own book. (I know because you tell me. Constantly. In the most flattering possible way.)

Small-town romance runs on best friends. Aspen Cove has a whole community of women who show up for each other in ways that routinely make me emotional about fictional people, which I stand behind entirely. It’s a found family that builds slowly across a long series, one book at a time, until you realize you’d trust these people with your actual life.

Aspen Cove has a whole community of women who show up for each other in ways that routinely make me emotional about fictional people, which I stand behind entirely. It's a found family that builds slowly across a long series, one book at a time, until you realize you'd trust these people with your actual life. If you haven't met them yet, One Hundred Reasons is a good starting place.

Happy Best Friends Day. Tell yours you love her. Then make her read something good.