Welcome to Group Project, a series on the many ways young people are building and engaging with community. From queer resistance to finding new hobbies to forging alternate paths, working together is more important than ever. Here's how young people are getting off their phones and seeking community IRL.
There is a piece of internet ephemera inspired by the 2000s YA novel series The Clique that might have been lost to time if not for writer and marketer Abby Adesanya, who saved it from her teenage years. The document, which she sends me via email, was originally posted by a 14-year-old named Marissa on a Clique-related message board under the title, “How to Be the It Girl.”
The 6,000-word document is a master class in how to achieve popularity, written from the perspective of a young teenager who was clearly interpreting the cultural world of the mid-to-late aughts: the rise of reality TV, the excessive wealth paraded by proto-influencers like Paris Hilton, the pressure to be thin and beautiful and loved at all costs. It’s divided into chapters like “Making Your Way Up the Social Ladder” and “Building a Fabulous Wardrobe.”
But not all the advice is shallow or fatphobic. In between some, frankly, useful tips about tweezing your eyebrows, there’s encouragement to embrace your flaws and what makes you unique, use your newfound popularity for good, and never pretend to be “dumb” in front of boys or anyone else. Near the end, Marissa explains how to bleach your freckles, with the caveat that “freckles are really pretty to have… look at Lindsay Lohan, she’s gorgeous!… and shouldn't need to be faded.”
Moreover, there’s a clear sense of community. These girls, wherever they lived and whoever they pretended to be on the internet, were in it together. A mass of teenagers learning how to take on the world.
That document is, like The Clique itself, a complicated piece of art — both extremely of its time, and with some not-so-surprising longevity in how kids and teens interpret societal beauty standards, how they form friendships and tear them apart, and why mean girls thrive in middle school. Writer Lena Wilson penned a 2021 essay for The New York Times headlined, “How the Clique Books Taught Me to Hate Other Girls and Myself” — but that argument doesn’t really tell the full story.
“Believe me, I wanted to respond [to the article], and everyone on my team was like, stand down,” author of the beloved series Lisi Harrison tells Teen Vogue with a smile. “If that were true, this community [of Clique readers] would be like a lot of the other communities out there, aggressive and angry and mean… [the] intention [of the books was] to show why mean girls are the way they are, to show that the constantly evolving and shifting social dynamics in your clique aren't just because today you're pretty and tomorrow you're not, or you have good clothes. It has nothing to do with any of that. [There] was a lot of medicine in that sugar syrup of The Clique.”
Harrison is taking that energy into a new era of The Clique, formed in collaboration with actress Ellen Marlow (who played Claire in the direct-to-video movie adaptation) and Adesanya, who is also a senior copywriter at Pinterest. Harrison and Marlow are working on a sequel novel together, while Adesanya helps them recreate the Clique community of old and promote the project with a centralized Substack called The State of the Reunion.
The beloved series about Westchester popular kids Massie Block, Alicia Rivera, Dylan Marvil, Kristen Gregory, and Claire Lyons — better known as the Pretty Committee — is, on the surface, a story of spoiled, rich, self-obsessed middle school kids decked out in designer fashion and jetting to New York City on the weekends. It was one of many similar novel series at the time: Gossip Girl, The A-List, Private.
Underneath the glossy veneer, however, was a story about an outsider learning to fit in, friends learning to let each other grow, preteens learning that the world is so much bigger than being a popular kid. Queen Bee Massie is both iconic and deeply flawed, monstrous and whip-smart, confident and insecure. How rare to see a 12-year-old girl character who can command a room, or lead an army, should she so choose. Rarer still to see a foil like Claire, the middle class Floridian who moves into Massie’s guest house at the beginning of the story, grapple with what it takes to rise to the top — and what you might lose along the way.
Adesanya was once a suburban teenager active on those fan forums, and she wrote in The Cut about her experience role-playing “rich and cool" online under the username @supermodella. Hundreds of Clique fans bonded on those message boards, each crafting a character they wanted to be rather than being themselves — preteens and teenagers with acne, insecurities, struggles at school, and often, no generational wealth. At one point, she was 16 years old and the administrator of LisiHarrison.net’s message boards, where she saw “How to Be the It Girl.”
“I joined and there's all of these girls and they're all pretending to be rich as well. Like, ‘Oh yeah, my dad just got me this Lamborghini, and I brought my little teacup to school in a Chanel tote.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, me too,’” says Adesanya, who wrote in her essay about struggling to assimilate into a new school in New Jersey in a district where fewer than 6% were Black students. The girls she bonded with would go on to be friends for years. “We were trying to help each other become the best versions of ourselves. That happened through the lens of trying on all these different personas.”
Eventually, the message board broke down, but the Clique community moved to a new board, and then to Facebook. “To this day I am in an Instagram group chat with 30 or 40 other girls from that website,” Adesanya says. When she saw the rumors that Harrison might be working on a new Clique novel, she immediately reached out to the author’s agent. “I was like, oh no, it's not coming back without me involved… [I wrote and said] I've got all these ideas, I have all these girls. We are so obsessed. We're still friends. It's been 10 years. I feel like it would be amazing if we could join forces.”
Within hours, she’d gotten a response from Lisi Harrison herself, who had just finished outlining what will eventually be the next book in the series — a continuation of the story that picks up when the Pretty Committee are in their late 20s and early 30s.
Harrison had long been feeling the itch to go back.
“I had this fantasy of bringing the characters of The Clique back and have them be the age that the fans are now,” she says. She would post sporadically about The Clique on her social media and immediately be flooded with likes. “I'd get this rush of excitement and connection and then realized that all the people responding are now in their late 20s. You're all adults now.”
She started writing The Clique in the early 2000s while working in development at MTV. She published the final novel in the original series, A Tale of Two Pretties, in 2011, and has since written a spinoff series Alphas as well as five other YA series and an adult series, The Dirty Book Club. But The Clique was first, and you never forget your first.
Simultaneously, Ellen Marlow, 31, had been reminiscing about the 2008 movie on TikTok. She’d been posting about her experiences on the film, which starred Marlow as Claire, Elizabeth McLaughlin as Massie, Bridgit Mendler as Kristen, Samantha Boscarino as Alicia, and Sophie Anna Everhard as Dylan. The feedback was a flood of comments asking for a reboot with the girls in their 20s and 30s. Marlow had never stopped being a Clique fan, and so she DM’d Harrison to ask if she’d ever thought about it. She had.
That was two and half years ago. Marlow and Harrison proceeded to work together for seven months on a 95-page outline with details on every chapter; Harrison bringing her lore and writing prowess, Marlow adding her experiences as a Millennial and her take on the characters. Harrison is currently getting down to the actual writing.
“It's like Christmas when Lisi sends me pages,” Marlow says. “Her voice is so distinct as a writer. It feels adult, but it still feels so Clique. It’s just the whole attitude, the use of language, the slang, all of it is very Clique coded… I'm very confident that the fanbase will be happy with where the Pretty Committee's at in 2025.”
The trio are tight-lipped about plot specifics, but Harrison and Marlow say they’ve learned that friendships and drama and life don’t necessarily change as you get older.
“That's what's funny, the problems are the same,” Marlow says. “We just have credit cards and we're getting married and going to bachelorette parties on weekends. I got left out of my friend's wedding. I'm not in the bridal party.” Harrison adds, “All my friends are getting married, I'm not. What's wrong with me? The actual material for this new Clique version, it's all right there. It's not like we have to dig very deep to find issues for these girls to deal with.”
Fundamentally, the new book will be about female friendship, Marlow says: “They of course have adult relationships with men, and women possibly, but the focus is really the dynamic between the group and the girls as they've reunited after all of these years.”
One thing Harrison would like to clear up: there won’t be sex scenes in the new book. “If anybody is wondering about that, you can spoil it right now, if you're looking for sex with these characters, it's never going to happen,” she says. “They will be having sex. I will not be talking about it or detailing it. I feel like I've known them since they were in seventh grade. I can't do that to them.” Marlow laughs, “We are not doing Clique smut.”
They’re currently searching for a publisher, but if not, “We'll take to the streets. We will get this book out there,” Harrison adds.
In the introduction to the then-final Clique book, Lisi Harrison wrote, “In 2002, when I began The Clique, pop culture was different. Materialism was trendy. The more designer initials on a handbag the better. ‘Who are you wearing?’ was more important than what you were wearing. Green stood for money, not the environment. It was a time of excess, and everyone was proud to wear their wealth on their silk sleeves… Now, eight years later, things are very different. The economy has tanked. Snatching up a killer pair of boots from Target or H&M has become a bigger source of pride than a $5,000 handbag. National security is the new insecurity. And I pray that the fatal reports of bullying (cyber and live) have forced you all to take an honest look at how you treat others. I don’t feel as compelled to shine a light on shallow behavior as I did in 2002, simply because there is less of it. Is it gone? Sadly, no. But it’s not as ubiquitous as it used to be.”
It’s a striking statement, because of course we’ve now cycled through those ideas once or twice over in the 15 years since. In 2025, thin is in again, bullying and harassment are ubiquitous on social media, people have eschewed the environment for fast fashion or Chat GPT, and national security is, well…
It might be the perfect time for a new edition of The Clique — and the community of readers gathering on The State of the Reunion is proof. The Substack publishes weekly book club recaps and discussions (they’re currently on The Pretty Committee Strikes Back), as well as fan fiction prompts and an Ask a GLU advice column. Recently, they launched a podcast called EhMaGawd, a play on a beloved Massie-ism. Think of the Substack as the road to the book, says Adesenya.
“These girls are so smart, they're so funny,” Marlow says of the fandom on the site. “They love all things The Clique. They make mood boards, they write fan fiction. It is so much fun to watch.”
The collaboration, and the response to it from fans, has affected them all. “Maybe this is the California, like, woo-woo of me, but there does seem to be some divine force that is just pulling everybody together for this,” Harrison says of working with Marlow and Adesenya.
Adesanya has come a long way from the teenager who pinned “How to Be the It Girl” on her bedroom wall before beginning her freshman year of high school. The plan for popularity didn’t exactly work, but in the process she gained something more valuable: the tools to define herself on her own terms, and a community to do it with.
“The best part about Lisi Harrison's message board was the fact that we all could just go on there and be whoever we wanted to be. We could make a username and say, we were Gossip Girl, Gucci Girl, xoxo, and people would just accept you as fact. They'd be like, ‘Okay, great. That's who you are, girl’ and welcome you with open arms,” Adesanya says. “Fast forward to today on the Substack where it's people's real names and people's real passions and everyone's sharing their life experiences, and we're all just accepting each other as we are.”
“This has been one of the most fulfilling experiences I've had in my entire career,” Harrison concludes. “We're not making a dime, and it is very time-consuming… [but this] is the connection that I have been missing probably since COVID. Even before that, as everybody has become so polarized and bifurcated and in their own little echo chambers. To suddenly be part of a community that is so positive, where I feel like I belong in a very organic, effortless sort of way, has truly just been something I've been missing from my life.”
