Euphoria is delicious as it is tumultuous. The series follows a group of high school students, a journey into how they figure out love and friendships amidst themselves in a world filled with social media, sex, drugs, and trauma. The lilting, entrancing cinematography frequently takes over the scene, but their friendships and relationships are just as compelling. Their loyalties shift, and their friendships change, like ocean currents that change on a dime.
The way they fall in, and fall out, with each other. The way they hurt, or heal, the people around them. All of it has become fodder for not only buzzy listicles, but also conversations about how we could be doing the same things to the people around us. After all, our decisions change the people around us, too. That is the crux of our workshop, 'Friendship is The Best Romance', with Daryl Qilin Yam.
We talked to Daryl a little more about how he approaches the concept of friendship in his life, and in his writing.
For your stories, you seem to always hold a microscope in the little things that happen between two people. How do you write about the intricacies of a relationship, romantic or otherwise?
I'm still trying to figure that part out myself, to be perfectly honest. I'm now beginning to realise, for example, that even in the closest of relationships, the things that we take for granted can also become the things that test the very bond between two people...
Observation is key, but one can only observe so much if there isn't any attempt at self-insight to accompany it. But if I were to speak in strictly literary terms, I do think that Katie Kitamura's Intimacies presents a fascinating case study on the matter. It's a novel that's invested in the moments of intimacy that can enable a deeper understanding to arise between two people, an intimacy that can be at once a privilege and also a matter of exclusion, of alienation, especially if one isn't privy to this intimacy. But again, the deeper, stranger matter beneath all this is – how the hell do people connect in this manner in the first place? That I can't answer. It happens all the time, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.
After writing so many stories, what fascinates you most when it comes to relationships?
That they remain first and foremost the reason why we change as people.
What do you think is most often overlooked when it comes to stories with friendship at its core?
That they end.
How do you think the pandemic has changed the way you relate to other people, be it if you know them or not?
I do think the pandemic sharpened many of our needs and wants. And I do think that survivalism imposed a new kind of sorting mechanism into the way we value our relationships: people knew where they truly stood in relation to one another, and there was no need to begrudge the other for it. But I do think I'm increasingly unable to relate to other people now, especially since the pandemic also allowed us to retreat even further into our digital selves. It's quite hard to tell what's real anymore, or what actually matters.
Join Daryl Qilin Yam in 'Friendship is The Best Romance'
In this workshop, we will be exploring the ways people fall in and out of friendships via a series of discussions, in-class readings and ideating exercises. The aim will be to see how the mercurial nature of friendships might be utilised to our advantage as storytellers, and as essential building blocks in our ideation of characters and storylines within our practices of fiction. ​ For a taste of what we're trying to achieve, you can read Seeing Ershadi by Nicole Krauss (contains sexually explicit content): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/seeing-ershadi