Imaginary Friends

I see that the main character of Ryan Oakley's new book is named Budgie. It's a strange name for "a knife wielding, brass knuckled young man from the impoverished and brutal red section of Toronto’s T-Dot Center." Though I mostly say this because, when I was two or three years old, my imaginary friend was named Budgie, too.

I recall Budgie as a middle aged man I didn't particularly like. He was grumpy, belligerent and disagreeable; he didn't know how to play properly and often sabotaged my games. I have a distinct memory of my mum setting a place for him at dinner and being totally dismayed that he was staying. (Though when I tell her this she laughs and claims that Budgie and I were thick as thieves. One of us, obviously, is guilty of what psychologists call "confabulation.")

I just took a quick online poll of five friends, all of whom are writers in some way. They include a professor of political science, a sports journalist, a screenwriter, a personal essayist, and a novelist. To my question, "Did you have an imaginary friend as a kid?" they responded as follows:

Professor: "No. Not at all."
Journalist: "No."
Screenwriter: "Not a friend, an imaginary monster with no name."
Essayist: "Two: Amy the Girl and Amy the Boy, siblings who traveled the world."
Novelist: "Not a 'person' as such, but some kind of elemental superhuman force that was watching me all the time & testing & grooming me for a special destiny, sending me signs, etc., so I felt constantly (constantly) watched & would try to interact with it, demonstrate that I understood, etc., do the tests, etc., & sometimes felt that I was 'pleasing' the thing & other times that I failed. It was very exciting but also sometimes crushing & horribly depressing."

I probably don't need to comment on these replies; I trust you can see where this is leading. Apparently 63% of kids have imaginary friends, though I wonder what proportion of adult fiction writers had their own Budgies as kids; I'd imagine it's higher, and I'd also imagine the worlds these characters inhabited were fully realized paracosms. And I wonder, as was the case with me and my novelist friend, how many of their made-up relationships were antagonistic?

Interesting, too, how normal, or at least innocuous, it is for kids to have imaginary friends, while adults who invent and engage with made-up people generally get put on medication -- while those of us who write it down get nominated for prizes and paid to write blog posts like this one.