“A children’s book for grownups” is how author Claire Messud describes her latest book, “The Burning Girl.” And no, she doesn’t mean a YA novel, but rather a mature, complicated narrative that requires an adult’s perspective but taps into the way children tell and experience stories.

“When you’re a kid and you hear a Greek myth – there was a maiden, Zeus fell in love with her, he came down and had a love affair with the maiden, his wife Hera got jealous, she turned the maiden into a cow,” Messud, 50, explained in an interview by phone. “As a grownup you’re like yeah, well, right, that’s a symbol for something. When you’re a kid, you’re like, ‘No, she turned her into a cow.’ It’s an acceptance that life’s mysterious.”

Julia, the book’s adolescent narrator, is just beginning to grapple with life’s many mysteries, the first of which is the sudden breakup of a friendship. It’s been two years and she’s still grieving for her former best friend, Cassie. “My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable,” Julia says. “Everyone loses a best friend at some point.” “The Burning Girl” is her grappling attempt to understand.

Like most people, Messud herself recalled friendships from her youth that had once seemed unconquerable dissolving for reasons she’s never been able to pinpoint. Those dead friendships gained new relevance for her when she watched her daughter, now 16, go through that unpleasant rite of passage.

“Sort of overnight, going into sixth grade, her best friend since nursery school, since the age of 4, just turned and walked away,” Messud said. “One of the things that was so striking to me … was my daughter’s bafflement. And my own bafflement! I thought, ‘Oh, I have the grown-up perspective, let me try and figure out from my distance what actually has happened here,’ and I really couldn’t.”

Cassie changes with their drifting. Never very good at school, she gets worse. Her burgeoning sexuality causes fights with her overbearing mother. She’s hanging out with the cool kids, playing Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle at boy-girl parties.

Once you get a clearer window into Cassie’s home life, you start to feel pretty confident where this story is going. Suddenly Cassie’s lonely, long-single mother has a boyfriend, a cadaverous doctor from her Bible study group who once treated Cassie in the emergency room. As their relationship intensifies, the boyfriend assumes an unsettling stepfather role. The rules become more draconian; the Bible is invoked as punishments are meted out.

As readers – or even TV watchers who have caught stray episodes of “How to Catch a Predator” or “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” – we have been trained to know how this story ends, to understand Cassie’s emotional upheaval and the shift in her personality.

But Messud doesn’t bow to the obvious; instead she disrupts it. “Some of the most pervasive narratives in our culture that we don’t talk about are about the doom of women who don’t behave well,” Messud said. “We are … the sum of every story we have ever been told, and every book we’ve ever read and every film we’ve ever seen, and we internalize stories and take from that an understanding of how a story is supposed to go, what’s supposed to happen.”

That kind of clarity only ever happens in easy fiction, though. Reality is much hazier, with its infinite shades of gray – shades that only become visible as you grow up and begin to realize you can never truly know another person. For Messud, that inability to know is part of the reason we tell stories, going all the way back to those Greek myths.

“There’s so much we don’t know,” Messud said. “Somebody might show up and turn us into a cow.”

Reach the writer at [email protected] or on Twitter at Twitter.com/BabsVan.

First Draft Book Club

What: A community conversation about “The Burning Girl” led by Republic reporter Barbara VanDenburgh.

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27.

Where: Changing Hands Phoenix, 300 W. Camelback Road.

Admission: Free; 20 percent discount on copies of “The Burning Girl” purchased at any Changing Hands location through Sept. 27. On night of the event, enjoy all-night happy-hour prices.

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