That Friend Who Died Too Young

Was taken on the ride to the friendship and emotions of two young women in 'The Queen of Bad Influences' by Jim Shepard, published in The New Yorker on June 8, 2025. This is the title story extracted from the author's upcoming new release scheduled for 2026, 'The Queen of Bad Influences and Other Stories'.

Set in 1913 in the English county of Gloucestershire, protagonist Constance is a newly minted adult and steps into the working world. She began working for her father's coal trading concern as a confidential secretary.

Constance then met Minna Royden, a legal secretary in a set of legal offices. The two women soon became firm friends. There might have been a hint of romance between them. It wasn't explicitly stated, and they've both talked about their future marriages with some eligible young men. Constance said that she cherished Minna as her 'Queen of Bad Influences'. “I’m not much in that regard,” Minna responded. “Though it is possible I’m too flexible for virtue and too virtuous for villainy.”

We move to 1915, and the two women accompanied Constance's father on a business trip to New York and returned to Liverpool on the Lusitania, a fast liner. In this fast liner, the author drew on the same historical British-registered ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat and it sank off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. Out of about 1959 passengers and crew, some 1197 perished in the sinking.  

Constance and her father survived the sinking. They were rescued from the waters and taken to the nearest town on the Irish coast. For two weeks after, they searched for Minna. She was nowhere to be found in the survivors' list or the injured. She wasn't in the huge pile of corpses brought to shore either. Constance and her father eventually returned home to Gloucestershire. 

Constance was wracked with guilt about Minna, presumed dead. They have had a squabble before the trip but made up. Then there was a bad falling out because Minna asked to work with Constance's father in his new consortium, but for some reason, Constance didn't welcome the idea, and even she herself didn't understand why. But the girls sort of made up on this trip, which was all business and what Minna wanted to be involved in. Four years later after the sinking, Constance was to be married, and even at this point, she was flooded by memories of Minna and her words, and their friendship. 

This seems to be a story more than just a window into lives of women in that era. We are left wondering how people recover from loss, survivor's guilt and what their takeaways are. There isn't a certain ending. It's a story, a vignette into the lives of Constance and her father, and the short tragic life that was Minna's. 

We all have that one friend, or two who died too young. These deceased friends would not be simply an acquaintance. This would be a friend we have spoken loads to and hung out often with. We would have had fights, or even deliberately broken the friendship. We would have had a history. How to we acquiesce with our feelings and the friendships? This story is a lot of heavier than I expected. 

Minna surveyed her expression. “Well, that puts me in mind of the way the rich choose to believe that the poor endanger them rather than the other way round,” she said.

But Constance offered no more in her own defense, for all her mortification.

“What a wretched lot of shrivelled creatures we could all become by and by,” Minna finally remarked, looking away. “And imagine where we might be headed, without our regard for one another.” She waited, and then refused to offer any more.

And after Constance had made her apologies, and took her leave, she listed for herself on the remainder of her walk those aspects of the desolation her friend was asking her to imagine: a return to the realm of the empty and the lonely, the self-stymieing and unnatural.