Adolescent Heroines and the Unexpected Epiphanies They Bring
Last Friday, six pages into Suzanne Collins Hunger Games, I had a revelation: I spent my entire adolescence reading about adults. I didn’t read The Chronicles of Narnia until my junior year of college. I read Little Women soon after. Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet was a college graduation gift I gave myself. A week and a half ago I finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. For some reason, be it lack of exposure or a subconscious resistance to reading “young adult” literature as a young adult, I don’t think I read a single book with a teenage protagonist in my teenage years, except a stray book here and there assigned by English teachers.
This being the case, I believe reading these books as an adult has had a paradigmatically different effect on me now than they would have at sixteen. Of course that’s not surprising, but what has surprised me is that I think they’ve hit me a lot harder and deeper reading at 30 instead of 15. While I dove into my (incredibly short if existent at all) winter school break hungry to read young adult fiction, I assumed it was a desire to immerse myself in tightly written narratives with fully contained worlds and mythologies. However, my first day reading Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games awoke me to the fact that maybe what I was really needing was to follow protagonists who were thirteen and sixteen. I’d like to be able to say that having been a teenager who read about the adult experience has made me into an adult who can enjoy books about the teenage experience, but I think its more accurate to say that my thirty-year-old self is trying to grapple with my conflicted adolescent past—trying to find the teenage feelings I managed to mostly evade as a teenager. Or maybe at this point in my life, about to complete graduate school, I feel like a teenager again, wondering where I’m supposed to go to finally start my real life.
Either way, spending the last three weeks with Lyra in The Golden Compass and Katniss in The Hunger Games, has unlocked spaces inside me I either did not know were there or had been carefully avoiding. It’s humbling to learn lessons from fictional teenagers, but it’s healing as well. Both Lyra and Katniss embody courageous abandon as well as deep innocence that grieve me to the extent of how foreign those things have always been to me. At the same time, they’ve reintroduced longings I had at that age that really have not changed much since then and may still be unmet. I thought I was reading to have my imagination awakened, but instead, I was forced to reflect on my reality. Like any great imaginative fiction, I found truth on the page, not fantasy.
When the first tears came 80 pages from the end of Philip Pulman’s trilogy, I had an instinctive urge to Tweet a self-deprecating joke about being jealous of fictional thirteen year olds’ ability to express their feelings, but thankfully, caught myself. Instead, I wept for the rest of the book. I don’t know if my thirteen year-old-self would have had the same response, but at thirty, maybe I finally feel able to listen to my own young girl’s voice, be sad with her, while still looking forward to all the things her life might possibly hold. I had no idea entering the world of juvenile fiction would mean entering grief. Now that I know, I have no choice but to keep reading. Hopefully Lyra and Katniss and Lucy and Jo and Meg Murray and the others will continue to be patient with me. Hopefully I will be as compassionate to myself as I am empathetic to them.
1 | Erin Blakemore
January 18th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Thank you for this post, KJ. I’ve noticed the same reaction in myself, too…the weird outpouring of sympathy and love for an age group I had no tolerance for or interest in while I was actually a part of it.
2 | Mack
January 19th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I wonder if everyone from scpa feels this way. We definitely weren’t the usual suspects of adolescence.
3 | Sarah C.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Finished Hunger Games last night! I was definitely drawn in to the story. I was intigued by how starkly the heroine struggles with masculinity and femininity, and how those two aspects definitely have differing levels of value assigned to them. I suppose there aren’t many interesting stories with fully integrated characters, but it made me think about the struggle to make sense of the mixture of so-called masculine and feminine within myself. Can’t wait to discuss with you!