halfcactus

Read Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, a 2011 YA novel I'd originally read in high school but that I a. had completely forgotten about and b. don't?? think?? I'd ever realized was by the Daniel Handler, better known for his writing as Lemony Snicket, until recently stumbling across a copy in a used bookstore. (I was not re-read-curious enough to buy the second-hand copy, but I found it on Libby.) The tl;dr plot is that a teenage girl unravels the threads of a short-lived relationship through the objects she'd collected during it: bottle caps, ticket stubs, etc. (Illustrated, which is a fun touch.) I can see what appealed to teenage!me - not a big reader of YA even when I was the target audience - about this book, which is that it's sort of endearingly pretentious: main character Minerva "Min" Green is obsessed with old and/or foreign films, and her narration is full of references to (fictional) movies and actors; the novel opens at her best friend's "bitter sixteen" party; the narrative voice has a very circa-2010s Tumblr Poetry vibe, addressed to "you", i.e., the boy Min is breaking up with. On the other hand, it is a teenage romance novel from 2011, which reminded me why I was, and am, not particularly into romance novels and also that 2011 was actually quite a while ago. (It also occurred to me, this time, that this can't possibly be set in 2011: there is exactly one reference to Min having a cell phone, but no one texts, she and her boyfriend have late-night calls over their landline home phones, and the internet does not appear to exist.)

On reflection, I wonder whether this was an intentional exercise in writing from the point of view of a character who would be the manic pixie dream girl love interest in a different story? Her love interest is a fondly baffled jock who says things like "I don't know any girls like you" and doesn't really get why it's important to her that the old woman they see at the cinema is maybe, possibly the actress in the film they just saw but goes along with the idea of throwing her (the actress) an eighty-ninth birthday party. ( Spoiler alert? ) There's a whole bit at the end about how she's not actually arty or interesting, she's just herself, a flawed and normal person.

In a YA-adjacent but wildly different read, I finally got around to Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson— I haven't actually read Go Ask Alice,* the supposedly true diary of a teenage drug addict that was actually written by a Mormon woman lying about being a psychologist, but the podcast You're Wrong About did a three-part episode on it in ...2022, apparently??, which is what originally brought Emerson's book to my attention, and then last week I listened to the more recent You're Wrong About/American Hysteria crossover episodes on literary hoaxes and was like, oh, right, I'd meant to read that. ANYWAY. This book is actually about both Go Ask Alice and Beatrice Sparks' 1979 follow-up, Jay's Journal— in which Sparks did take the actual diary of a 16-year-old who died by suicide, handed over to Sparks by his grieving mother, and then rewrote it to be about ~the occult~ (in the worst of both worlds, lifting just enough of Alden Barrett's actual diary to make him and his family, friends, hometown, etc., clearly identifiable among the 90% insane fabrications)— and its role in the Satanic Panic of the '80s. Which is a topic with absolutely no contemporary relevance, obviously. By the end, Emerson is so clearly sick of wading through Sparks' nonsense that you get lines like "Beatrice Sparks was no more a psychologist than she was a Sasquatch, and even a lazy editor could have unraveled the lies with a single phone call."

* I have the memory of coming across it in middle school, reading the first couple of pages where she's just whining about boys and school, and deciding I had no interest in it. So, technically, I didn't finish Go Ask Alice because it was too boring.