What This Theme Explores
Friendship in How to Make Friends with the Dark is not just companionship; it’s the force that steadies a life ruptured by loss. The novel asks how connection can sustain someone when family collapses, and whether different kinds of friends—old, new, expected, and unlikely—can meet different needs. It probes the limits of loyalty under pressure, the hard truth that some bonds break in crisis, and the surprising grace of solidarity forged in pain. Ultimately, it explores friendship as both a mirror and a bridge: it reflects the protagonist’s wounds while carrying her toward healing.
How It Develops
When Tiger Tolliver’s world shatters, her understanding of friendship must expand beyond a single reliable anchor. Before the loss, her life revolves around a stable dyad with Cake Rishworth: a friendship of daily rituals, unspoken care, and steady presence. A tentative bond with Kai Henderson flutters at the edges, shimmering with the possibility that romance can grow out of trust.
The immediate aftermath of June Tolliver’s death fractures these early certainties. Tiger’s grief overwhelms the structures that once held her, and the test is brutal: Kai falters and leaves the hospital, revealing how hope-filled connections can crumble under the weight of trauma. Even with Cake, Tiger’s pain curdles into anger; she lashes out, proving that deep friendships can strain when sorrow seeks a target.
Once Tiger is placed in the foster system, friendship becomes more than comfort—it’s a survival strategy. At LaLa’s house, she forms a quiet alliance with Thaddeus Roach, grounded not in shared history but in shared displacement. Here the novel shifts from friendship as an intimate given to friendship as a chosen, necessary bond in a hostile landscape.
The most profound reshaping comes through the Grief Group, where Tiger meets former adversaries and strangers who recognize her exact pain. With Lupe Hidalgo and Mae-Lynn Carpenter, connection is forged not by popularity or proximity but by loss. These friends provide what even Cake cannot—an insider’s language for the “Big Suck” of grief—widening Tiger’s network into a mosaic of care that meets her in different moments and moods. By the end, friendship is no longer a single lifeline; it’s a web strong enough to catch her when she falls.
Key Examples
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Cake’s unwavering care becomes literal nourishment. Her habit of packing extra food wordlessly meets Tiger’s most basic needs in a home where scarcity is normal.
Cake always brings extra food for me. We don’t even talk about it anymore.
Sometimes I’m so grateful for Cake I could burst. I bite into the sandwich. Cream cheese and strawberries. This small, persistent ritual shows friendship anticipating needs without demanding confession. Later, when Tiger is suicidal, Cake plays her violin over the phone until Tiger falls asleep—transforming steady kindness into an emergency lifeline. -
The failure of a friendship exposes grief’s pressure point. After the first kiss, Kai receives the call about June and then leaves the hospital.
“Where’s Kai?”
“He left.”
“He just left?” The clipped exchange lays bare the shock of abandonment. Kai’s exit doesn’t villainize him so much as acknowledge that not every bond is equipped for catastrophe—and that Tiger must learn which friendships can hold the weight. -
Friendships forged in darkness become the novel’s most surprising grace. In the arroyo after Grief Group, Tiger and the others trade unvarnished stories, accepting that there is no fixing, only witnessing. Mae-Lynn’s blunt welcome names the terrain Tiger is entering, offering validation rather than platitudes. Lupe’s revelation about her brother’s death reframes a bully as a fellow mourner; later, she cleans Tiger’s wounds and shares reckless escape in the Jellymobile—acts that complicate “enemy” into empathetic friend.
Character Connections
Tiger Tolliver embodies the theme’s arc: she begins reliant on one person and learns to trust a constellation. Each new bond marks a stage in her healing, teaching her to receive care without shame and to recognize that different friends meet different parts of her grief.
Cake Rishworth is the North Star of dependable friendship—loyal, practical, and deeply attuned. Her challenge is to be present without erasing herself: she must both hold Tiger through crisis and pursue her own dreams, like the summer music camp. Their bond models how true friendship can set boundaries without withdrawing love.
Kai Henderson personifies the fragile promise of emerging intimacy. His absence after June’s death illustrates that kindness and attraction aren’t the same as readiness for the depths grief demands. Through Kai, the novel refuses easy moralizing, showing that friendship can fail without malice—and that failure still hurts.
Thaddeus Roach offers solidarity born of experience. As someone who knows the system’s churn and parental harm, he meets Tiger where she lives: in fear, dislocation, and the need for quiet trust. Their bond is a survivor’s pact, grounded in mutual respect more than overt comfort.
The Grief Group (including Lupe, Mae-Lynn, Taran, and Alif) forms a found family by naming what others avoid. They replace hierarchy with reciprocity: former bullies become caretakers, strangers become companions, and the arroyo becomes a sanctuary. Together, they demonstrate that shared vulnerability can dismantle social walls and build durable community.
Symbolic Elements
Cake’s daily lunches are a tactile emblem of care: love you can swallow when words fail. In a life marked by lack, that extra sandwich is constancy—a small, steady promise that someone is watching out for you.
The phone serves as a lifeline and tether. Texts and late-night calls bridge the isolating silence of grief; the violin over the line turns technology into a conduit for presence when bodies can’t be there.
The arroyo, a dry riverbed, is a paradoxical wellspring. Its “low place” outside school’s gaze lets grief run unpoliced, so honest friendship can flow. What looks barren becomes fertile ground for connection.
Contemporary Relevance
Friendship’s role in the novel mirrors how many teens and young adults navigate crisis now: friends are often the first responders when mental health resources feel distant or stigmatized. In a world of shifting family structures, found families offer stability that biology can’t guarantee. The book also recognizes grief’s public stage—where pain can trend or be mocked—and argues for private, compassionate spaces where people can be held rather than watched. Above all, it urges a practice of empathy that looks past labels to the hidden losses everyone carries.
Essential Quote
“Welcome to the Big Suck. It’s going to be really bad.”
Mae-Lynn’s blunt greeting rejects the pressure to “be okay” and instead offers truthful companionship. By naming grief honestly, she creates a fellowship of the broken that is paradoxically healing: the comfort isn’t in fixing Tiger’s pain, but in refusing to let her face it alone.