The dirty secret of friendships: if women love their best buds why do they always dish about them? Novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez explores this destructive phenomenon. (On My Mind).

Any woman who has ever had a group of close friends knows the ugly truth of female relationships: We constantly size each other up. Like many women, I have compared my figure, my boyfriend, my salary, mad my mental health to those of my girlfriends. At times, I felt that I came up short, and at other times, I gloated over my superiorly. But in all honesty, until I sat down to write my first novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, I wasn't fully able to admit how guilty I was of measuring myself against my friends.

Since my book features a group of college grads who reunite several times a year, I had to get inside the heads of all six female characters and examine the ways they relate to one another. As their personalities cane to life, it was obvious to me that while they loved each other deeply, they also constantly competed against one another mentally. One of the characters, a romantically challenged, overeating newspaper columnist named Lauren, is particularly envious of Rebecca, a size-2 magazine publisher with a seemingly perfect husband. Lauren lets her jealousy fester unchecked until it grows to the point where it nearly destroys their relationship.

But that's not the only way that playing the constant-comparison game can burn you. Judging your friends can also erode trust overtime. I learned this lesson young. During the summer before high school, my best friends, Stacy and Adriana, and I all tried out for the freshman cheerleading squad. I made the mistake of criticizing Stacy's performance to Adriana, and then doing the same about Adriana to Stacy. I made the squad but slowly discovered that Stacy and Adriana did not want to be friends with me anymore, because they had found out from each other that I had bad-mouthed them and they no longer trusted me. I was so crushed that I eventually transferred to a ...