Here’s a book
I bought on a whim. It’s something I never do, but there I was confronted on
the shelves of Waterstones with a light green paperback: entitled Fangirl.
I’ve usually
heard of the novel before I ever see it. Most books I read come from something.
Reading The Fault in Our Stars came
about after having watched John’s YouTube content; reading Boy Meets Boy and David Levithan’s other novels then came about
from reading 2(WG); or am introduced
to an author or a novel from English Lit. classes, or based on a friend’s
recommendation; I even read The Diary of
Anne Frank because of TFIOS. (Maybe I’ll do the same with this novel for The Outsiders?)
There’s
security in that. And here I am faced with this book I’ve never heard of,
written by this writer with an obviously pseudonymous name that sounds right
out of MLP.
But two
things appealed to me: firstly, the cover. I find reasons to reject a book
immediately, whether it makes sense to or not. The cover is depicts a
Photoshopped model. The cover is bright pink. The font size is too big. The
typeface is Comic Sans. Because my pile is large and eternally growing. One
wants to avoid adding to it, at least not until another on that pile is read
through, but that is in itself impossible.
This book is
something different. Two stylised figures, one with a laptop; the other with in
a plaid flannel shirt: Girl and Boy, hanging about on the words of the cover.
Then the interior cover: the front, a cartoon dramatis personae; the back, a two-panel comic strip of page 287
(spoilers.) I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with graphic design, but
this was something just perfect.
The concept
of the novel itself is something to timely, so contemporary that people will
look at it in a few years and think “that is so 2013.” There are two
types of novels: it is either overwhelmingly timeless or overwhelmingly
current. Like, here’s the destruction of the Twin Towers compared against the
hero’s journey to defeat any danger in the way and rescue the princess. Here’s
a book which defines the present day, and that in itself is incredibly
interesting.
It’s said
“don’t judge a book my its cover”, and I did exactly that. And what a brilliant
decision that was.
Like
basically every single YA novel, it’s a bildungsroman story. But it’s an
incredibly good one at that.
Cath is a
college freshman. Since the age of 16, she’s been working on a piece of
fanfiction, Carry On, Simon, about an
11 year old boy from England who faces his ultimate nemesis at a supernatural
wizarding school (sound familiar?), to thousands of hits and even a “Keep
Calm...” shirt on Etsy. The analogy is obvious: the boy Simon Snow is the
Mage’s Heir, doesn’t have parents and then meets a girl, Penelope Bunce and his evil roommate, Tyrannus Basilton Pitch, or ‘Baz.’ It’s a world where every name is
odd and melodramatic, and every teacher is quirky and eccentric, written by a
female writer whose name exists in three parts. That other series exists in
this world (Cath references it a few times), and one would expect characters to
be raving about the final film, and for the Simon
Snow series to have been dismissed as plagiarism years ago. So let’s look
at this as a different world where Philosopher’s
Stone didn’t become a bestseller, but sold moderately and in its place Simon Snow filled its gap in satiating
millions of young readers.
That book
series has never really been my thing (although, much to Cath’s annoyance, I’ve
only seen the films.) But it’s a great focus to wrap the novel around, because
it is such a vast thing which has influenced so many people.
In many ways
it’s a book about the end of childhood, as one perceives it. Arbitrarily, one
assigns adulthood from the age of 18 onwards. (Of course, in small ways, the
same is done from 16, and 21, etc.) Cath is now 18 and is expected to grow up
in the ‘real world’ of independence, jobs, boyfriends and, uh, frat parties.
Cath’s life
has been guided, if not defined, by the Simon Snow book series. Told in eight
parts since the first paperback in 2001 (sounds familiar – there’s even a 3
year gap between books 3 and 4), it’s been adapted into films (of which there
are at least 4), and it’s so popular that it gets Time magazine articles,
midnight releases and legions of fic writers who ship characters together,
including the Sazzy pairing of Baz and Simon, the focus of Cath’s work. Now
she’s studying fiction-writing at university, and she has to find her own
characters and different inspirations.
Along with
Cath’s childhood, Simon Snow is
ending too. The last book, the Eighth
Dance is to be released within months. At the same time, she’s trying to
complete her epic project before the book draws a close to the series. That
ending is not arbitrary; it’s a set in stone date of release because of the
prose’s completion; the date is not a ‘because.’
Cath’s got an
indentical twin sister, too. Identical twins aren’t something I appreciate.
There’s a pair of twin sisters at school, and there’s been times where I’ve
addressed one thinking them to be the other. Their hairstyles are the same,
their friend groups identical, and their clothing styles probably from the same
wardrobe. Wren serves as a mirror of her character: she’s not the socially
awkward, emotional glasses person that Cath is (neither is she adorned with
glasses), but she has strings of boyfriends, hosts parties and drinks a fair
bit. Cath’s relationships are sparse, are entered with uncertainty and a lot of
time. Her alcohol is Starbucks, and she spends a lot of time asking if and when
she wants to lose her virginity to the boy she eventually ends up dating within
the book’s 450 pages. There’s a line which stands out to me: with first times,
“one only gets graded on attendance.”
Maybe it’s a
little too obvious to give us identical but opposite twins, but it serves the
novel well. It’s good to see her family amongst what is very much the end of
the family dynamic that has served her since birth. They have a single father
who works in advertising, and he has to adjust to not having the twins at home.
The two attend the same university, Nebraska-Lincoln, and Cath very much feels
they should maintain that same sisterly relationship and look out for each
other; only Cath finds they need each other less and less.
But this book
is not about fanfiction. This book is about the fundamental question of what
role fiction serves, and the writing process; the real provenance of works and
how one can accredit ideas to a specific person, or source. Cath’s writing
becomes a simulation of her own life. She has written romance and sex (“with
the wrong parts”), and now she is experiencing what she has written. That
simulation is her expectation, and she notes when the kisses are different,
that the love is not in the heart and that it’s just different.
There’s also
identity, too. In one scene Cath talks to a girl IRL, who’s a fan of Carry On, Simon. Cath presents herself
as a fan, and not the writer, because she is hidden behind a guise, a username
which is also her penname. Does it stretch credibility that the girl doesn’t
realise they are one and the same? Maybe, but then with usernames it all blends
together; it becomes monosyllabic and not polysyllabic. Usernames are really
names someone doesn’t understand until someone clearly explains it to them.
Their own life is hidden behind a shield, written in ambiguity and allusions
but never clarity. It’s something ‘other’, which Cath tries to keep as
something ‘other’ from the start of the novel, hiding it from others, only to
find others know about it.
Young adult
fiction is a funny thing. Even at this age it seems a little odd to me to be
going right to the teenage section, as if it’s something lesser to the adult.
Of course, it ranges from 13-19. But one associates it with the 13 side of
things, not the 19 side of things. But I’ve grown up. At 16 I could relate to
the 16-year-old Holden Caufield and the 16-year-old Hazel struggling to deal
with life, and now at 17 I’m approaching the age where I will be moving onto
the ‘next step’, leaving home behind for university libraries. I can relate to
Cath and her fan fiction. The derivative is what introduced me to the skills of
writing and filmmaking; I spent my childhood writing Doctor Who fanfic (non-sexual, not knowing what sexual was;
although having said that I have unknowingly written gay Who-fic), and then my
teen years editing Doctor Who fan
videos; now I’m moving from that over to more original, ‘mature’ stuff. Heck, my introduction to reading was with spin-off novels for Doctor Who and Star Wars. The
conflict between writing what school wants you to and writing what you actually
care about is something that, like Cath, I relate to, and probably everyone
does. Determining when it is right to take off my pants and entrap myself in a
boy’s bed is a pretty big issue right now too. It’s something I’ve thought
about a lot, how I should pace myself (ourselves) and when ‘everyone else’ is
doing as such (as seen here by Wren and other characters), and whether to be
mindless or meaningful. The question of whether to turn a situation from just sitting on one’s lap, or just kissing has also been brought with
me to the bedroom. But Rowell (like Cath) makes the love cute, and not erotic.
I’m probably
outside the book’s target audience. Fundamentally it’s ‘chick lit’, and that’s
what mum referred to it as when she noticed what I was reading. But I refuse to
call it that.
With the word
‘girl’ taking up over half the title, the book written by a female author, duh,
it’s for girls. I’m sure someone will be quick to dispute this, but I kind of
feel as a gay guy I’m more open to reading books ‘meant’ for the ‘fairer sex’
(an archaic term I hate, btw.) Keeping up a heterosexual masculinity isn’t
something I particularly concern myself about, so I’m all for reading about
someone who clearly isn’t myself so far as sex is concerned, although I too,
like Cath, care for finding the perfect guy. Like, my comics pull-list consists
of Black Widow and She-Hulk, and I would totally add Storm to that list if I had more money. But
when it’s a really good story (and, I guess, when it’s not a story which
concerns itself with first periods or boob size, unlike the likes of Angus, Thongs...), it transcends gender
to just be a really good story. There can be a self consciousness as to "oh, this is clearly not for me." As a kid, I felt bad about reading Tracy Beaker, having love love loved the TV series, when Jacquelince Wilson is clearly writing for young girls, not boys, basing it around a female protagonist. I returned the book to the library unfinished. More mainstream YA books like TFIOS or The Hunger Games seems to cross that barrier a little more, and I'd probably put that down to being more mainstream in the public consciousness. Both female protagonists, but they find a wider reach. Could it be down to the subject matter? We could speculate about this all day.
Rowell’s
other YA novel, Eleanor and Park, doesn’t
reflect on the present, but reflects on Rowell’s own past as a teenager in the
1980s (yes, I was surprised to learn she’s not a young writer starting out in
her 20s, but double that.) One shouldn’t judge a book until they’ve read it as
a whole either, but when I was halfway through this I picked that up too, in
its nice new yellow edition with earbuds and all (John Green’s recommendation
of it during the TFIOS livestream earlier this year helped, too.) It should be
an interesting read, because a) I love the 80s so much and b) I read so much
about the present, or the present as written, that a change of pace will be
interesting. I’ve just read the comic Deadly
Class, so it’ll be an interesting contrast to that. (Rowell has two adult
novels in her bibliography too, which I may come to at some point.) It’s
another romance, but I’m sure it will be good.
