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Teen angst, pathos and humor
May 05, 2006
So what’s the first thing I do after finishing a grueling stretch of term paper writing? (I mean, after the sleep, profuse masturbation and hanging out with friends). I READ.
Yes, I am an incurable nerd. After finishing a semester, I crave the reading I’ve been missing out on. I feel guilty about the great readings and book parties I missed while I was immersed in the insanity of my writing, and then I dive in. I miss my subway stop. I stay up late. I read when I’m walking (not a good idea).
Two recent reads I’ve been really enamored with are Michelle Tea’s Rose of No Man’s Land and Cristy Road’s Indestructible. Both are about the struggles of teen age girl misfits - Tea’s is fictional while Road’s is not. On a basic level, both books are wryly comical with a heady dash of raw emotionality to them. They are about both vulnerability and angry defenses. Your typically angsty stuff - but not in a bad way. Its angst, written with the knowledge of hindsight, with jabs at the self righteousness of teenagers.
I know what reading these books is like for me now, obviously, since I’m reading them in the present. But I wonder about my 15 year old self, and what it would have been like for her to read them. My 15 year old self was reading the British romantics; I lost myself in the early nineteenth century world of Lord Byron, Keats and the Shelleys. Escapism in its nerdy finest. Though it is quite possible that I lived under a rock, I never came across books like these in my teen years, perhaps because the people who would later write them were teenagers like me, and they were making zines.
Certainly I would identify with Tea’s protagonist Trisha, and with Cristy as well (though being a middle class rural white kid, I definitely didn’t have the same kind of consciousness about class and race as Cristy). I’d identify with the sense of being naive and knowing too much, of being in a psychosexual battleground between self and other, with the sense of flippantly doing heavy things. Hell, I identify with that now, in the extended adolesence of my twenties.
I hope that these are books that teen girls will read, because they are beautiful and they connect the dots between the ugliness and humor of being a teenage girl who is ill fitted to the strict trappings of gender, sexuality and other invisible but highly enforced rules of girldom.
*Photo of Cristy looking adorable at the opening for Sex Worker Visions by Erin Siegal.
Posted by Dacia at May 5, 2006 01:36 AM
Comments
Ah! Indestructible! I ordered it a few months before it was just published (and finally checked my mail so I could read it!). I’ve admired Christy Road’s artwork for a long time, and haven’t read any of her writing prior to this (though now I’m going to try to get copies of her zine). I really really enjoyed this book, and think I’ll be rereading it many times. I particularly like her discussions of conflicting identities - latina, punk, queer - as well as her discussions of sexuality and mainstream beauty ideals (skinny white girl v. curvy latina girl). I’ll definately check out Michelle Tea’s new book. I really enjoyed Rent Girl and Valencia, and didn’t know she’d published something new. Have you read Off The Map? It’s published by CrimethInc., and reminds me a bit of Indestructible. It’s a non-fiction narrative of two young women who hitch and squat across Europe, and their adventures there. Lots of good discussion on anarchist communities. I reccommend it highly.
Posted by: Lioness at May 6, 2006 06:28 PM
I almost forgot about Indestructible. I’d mailed Cristy about it after peeping her work at the Sex Workers Visions thing and she told me it might be at Bluestockings…but that was a while back and when I went there then, I didn’t see it. I’ll have to check back.
Posted by: Irezumi Kiss at May 7, 2006 10:37 AM
Draw not your bow till your arrow is fixed… Dionisius
Posted by: Dionisius at November 29, 2006 06:04 AM
