Hi, all!
Today, I have a very powerful guest post from the fantastic Kelly Jensen. I'm not going to say too much about it, but rather let Kelly do the talking. It is such a great post, and such an important one. I really hope you'll take the time to read it.
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The girls you meet in a Courtney
Summers book are not pretty. They’re not nice. And they are not shy about
either of those things.
But these are the girls you and I
both know.
Earlier this fall, Courtney wrote an
excellent piece called writing for girls,
and in it, she talks about how it was hard to get her work published in the
first place because she doesn’t write the easily digestible female main
character. She doesn’t force her characters to get through their challenges
with an easy way out -- they have to fight all the way through it, and many
times, that fight is far from pretty. She doesn’t write girls who follow the
rules or submit to the social standards of what it means to be a girl and “take
it.”
In Cracked Up to Be, Parker
is biting. She’s easy to dislike and write off as the kind of girl you don’t
want to get to know. But this is her appeal: she doesn’t want to let you
get to know her. She’s burning inside, secrets eating her alive. Parker takes
to snark -- a quality that, had she been a boy, rather than a girl, wouldn’t
lead to her being “unlikable” or ugly, but perhaps instead “charming.”
Parker drops out of the public eye
and seeks opportunities to get away, to essentially be unseen and forgotten.
Her destructive habits, on the surface, don’t impact other people. They’re
meant to harm just her. They’re meant to dull down the ache she has internally.
She is not, by traditional views, a “strong” character. She is broken and
irredeemable.
Of course, we know this isn’t true.
We know by the end of the book why she’s taken to such internal torment and why
she lashes out the way that she does. Her coping mechanisms are simply that:
means of working through her anguish, making mental sense of what happened, and
figuring out her own role in everything that went down.
It’s interesting to consider how
Parker might be read were she not a girl. If Parker had a penis, would he
endure the same kind of reaction from other characters? Would people consider
him broken for how he chose to deal with what was eating him up? Or would they
accept that something was going on with him, let him have his business and give
him space, then readily welcome him back into the fold?
How would readers consider
Parker if Parker were a he?
When Regina’s put into a situation
where she’s a victim of sexual assault at the hands of her best friend’s
boyfriend, she’s immediately labeled the problem in Some Girls Are.
There’s no jury here, no opportunity for Regina to state her case. She’s the
criminal, not the victim. But unlike Parker, Regina’s coping mechanism isn’t
internal. It’s external. She’s out for blood in the same way her former friends
are.
Regina is a girl with anger, and
she’s not afraid to show that anger. So often, girls are told that anger
is an emotion they can’t feel and can’t show. That it’s not becoming of them.
That’s why Regina’s actions -- her external expression of those feelings -- are
deemed unlikable. And even when she’s pushed to the brink, locked in a closet
with the very boy who set off the chain of reactions that sent her from
top-of-the-food-chain to the bottom, many find it hard to sympathize with her
because of how she’s behaved up until that point. Being put in that closet
removes her from the situations she’s causing externally and forces her to
instead deal with those internal demons (in more ways than one).
Is she worthy of that sympathy? Of
course. She was worthy in chapter one. She was worthy throughout, even with her
own aggressive behavior. Her actions aren’t right, and they impact a LOT of
people. She is her own problem in many ways. But because she’s a girl, she’s
saddled with unfair baggage that says there’s something wrong with how she’s
feeling and expressing herself. She’s angry, hurt, and desperate, but she’s
also entirely unlikable and can’t be redeemed because of those things.
Regina recast as a Reggie instead
would probably make her behavior less unlikable. It might be understandable,
even encouraged. Because a boy’s gotta stand up for himself and his
reputation.
A girl though. She should just take
it.
Grief is ugly to those facing loss,
as well as those trying to be there for the person experiencing that grief. But
grief isn’t necessarily debilitating -- it manifests in complex ways. For Eddie
in Fall for Anything, grief emerges from a sense of wanting to know why.
Why is it her father chose to end his own life? Why didn’t he tell anyone he
was considering this option? Why didn’t he get help?
It also springs from the questions
Eddie has about whether she herself played a role at all in his decision.
Eddie’s grief is selfish. But all
grief is. Except, what makes Eddie hard to swallow to those in her life, as
well many of those reading her story, is that she pursues that desire to know
answers to questions that don’t exist. She pursues the mysterious boy who claims
to know things. She pushes away her hurting mother, as well as her mother’s
friend. Eddie doesn’t sit around nor pause to consider how her own actions
would impact anyone else’s.
But is she wholly selfish for this
or is this selfishness considered such because she’s not yielding to niceness?
Or because she’s not putting everyone before herself? And while there’s no
doubt Milo is a great guy in this story, it’s impossible not to wonder whether
that’s because he’s easier to take than Eddie. He’s far less intense.
Consider Eddie as a boy. Would he be
selfish then, or would he be a hero for seeking that closure?
Is Sloane selfish for wanting to
kill herself in This Is Not A Test? For many readers -- a startling
number, in fact -- that death would have been the best resolution to her story.
Despite years of suffering at the hands of her father’s abuse, both physically
and (perhaps more painfully) mentally, she’s too frequently viewed as whiny and
worthless. Even after being abandoned by her sister and having a promise of
getting out together be broken, many see Sloane’s anguish as silly. Trite.
Sloane’s own personal history should
have no bearing on how she reacts when everything in the world changes. Except
of course it does -- you can’t unwrite your own past. When you’ve lived a life
where following the rules and being obedient is a requirement and suddenly
you’re tossed into a world without those rules, you have no internal
cues from which to make sense of things. And if you’re Sloane and your plans
for your own death were disrupted, all you can do is hope that you aren’t a
burden onto other people in the way you’ve been a burden to your own family.
Girls are told they should be bright
and positive. That they should hope. That when something bad happens to them,
they should pick up the pieces and move on. Or more -- they’re told they’re
never actually broken, that there are no pieces to “pick up,” that whatever
they’re feeling or experiencing or thinking inside is self-pity and isn’t real
or justifiable.
That if they feel anything other
than rainbows and butterflies, if they appear any way other than ready to serve
and submit to those around them, they might as well die because what’s the
point? Girls should be secondary characters in their own stories. If a girl
wants what other people have -- to feel good, to feel loved, to feel like she
belongs no matter what -- then she is ungrateful for even being given an
opportunity to life.
Would we even consider a boy being
in the same position as Sloane? And if so, what would that look like? How would
the other people stuck with him during the zombie apocalypse react to his
behavior? Would he be told that his life would be better if he were dead
instead of actively feeling what it was he felt? Would he deserve the moments
of affection and care others give him?
All girls have witnessed something
that’s impacted them.
All girls have been victims of
bullying on some level -- for reasons out of their own control.
All girls have felt anger.
All girls have experienced grief and
the need to find answers to questions they have.
All girls have felt alone.
Courtney Summers writes the girls we
know because she writes the girls we are sometimes: ugly, confusing,
frustrating, seeking, desiring, breaking, bending, taking, and making. We’re
all complex and dynamic, unlikable and brutal. We’re all agents in our own
lives, rather than passive actors here for others around us.
Our stories don’t have solid endings
-- even when we’ve come to the conclusion of a series of events, there are
often things left unresolved, open, with the possibility for more, whether that
“more” is from a place of hope or not.
There’s no need to slap a bow on top
of a package that’s complicated; instead, these stories shake the boxes, untie
the ribbon, and opens the box.
These are stories about being a girl
and fighting against everything we’re told isn’t allowed in order to be
a girl.
****
Thank you SO MUCH Kelly for that beautiful post. It's such an important topic, and one I think gets brushed aside all too often. I've said it before and I'll know doubt say it again but, to me, the characters in Courtney's books are so incredibly real. They are real characters facing real issues. Not pretty, happy-ending issues, but rather the painful, brutal problems people face every day. Her books are important. Powerful. Real. And need to be read.
Now, Kelly has been EVEN MORE AWESOME and is offering up a giveaway! One grand prize winner will receive a copy of ALL of Courtney Summers novels! That's right, all of them! That's one copy of WHAT GOES AROUND (the bind-up of CRACKED UP TO BE and SOME GIRLS ARE), FALL FOR ANYTHING, and THIS IS NOT A TEST. How epic is that?
Giveaway Rules:
- Must be 13 years or older
- INTERNATIONAL (where the Book Depository ships!)
- You do NOT have to be a participant in the Read-Along to enter
**If you ARE a participant, you will get extra entries!
- Not responsible for lost or damaged prizes (sorry!)
- I reserve the right to disqualify as I see fit (aka don't fake entries pretty please!)
- Fill in the Rafflecopter form to be entered!
The giveaway will last from NOW until DECEMBER 30th at 11:59pm!
Good luck, and enter away!
- Ciara (Lost at Midnight)
