Books Every Teenage Girl Should Read — In Secret

In our freshman year at Austin High, my friend Mary (whom you know as Dog Canyon contributor Mary Lowry) brought a treasure to school: A slender book with a paper cover the color of persimmons, which turned out to be an uncorrected, galley-proof copy of a novel called Weetzie Bat.

We were in the cafeteria — that I remember clearly, along with the sunlight that streamed through high-up windows as Mary pulled the book out of her backpack, her look of glee like that of a boy pulling out a contraband copy of Playboy. I don’t recall how she’d gotten her hands on a galley copy. She was always doing things like that — introducing me to things I’d never heard of before; making unlikely miracles seem regular and effortless, and sharing them blithely with her friends. I do remember having the sense that, holding the galley proof, we were holding raw Truth in our hands.

The book begins with these two sentences: “The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. They didn’t even realize where they were living.” Those lines held all the promise I needed that Weetzie’s life would mirror my own: the isolation of high school, of being a nerdy-cool girl who made my own awkward clothes and wore them with proud defiance, of feeling almost painfully awake to music, ideas, art, while adrift in a sea of zombies — other kids, my parents, everyone around me who just seemed so damn asleep. What could be closer to the teenage drama and psyche than that? My years from age twelve to twenty-two were spent actively trying to figure out who I was and what my place in this weird, chaotic world might be, and Weetzie Bat helped.

Girls in America grow up with the knowledge, whether conscious or subliminal, that in the eyes of much of the world, their worth is based in their bodies: their looks, their passive ability to seduce men. (By passive seduction, I mean our culture’s version of female sexuality, in which seduction is as simple as standing still and being admired, desired or possessed.) Since some people believe this is all a girl has to offer, a girl must make a choice: to be complicit with this version of herself, or to reject such a straitjacket in favor of self-determination.

What helped me navigate the rough, unpredictable waters of growing up female in America? Books. Novels that brought clarity and definition to my feelings and experiences. Weetzie Bat was one of those novels, and twenty years later, I view my first reading of it as a turning point. I could have drowned under the weight of the overt pressures of teenage boys or the subtler pressures of the American Beauty Standard and patriarchy in general. Instead, I grabbed onto books as lifeboats, and fought for the courage to be myself — or at least to experiment, through clothes, hairstyles, music, literature, friendships, with what “myself” might turn out to be.

Thank goodness, my mother never limited my reading material. I didn’t have to read Weetzie Bat in secret. But many teenage girls might. After all, Weetzie’s best friend, Dirk, is gay, and they go “duck hunting” together — trolling for true love, or at least for cute boys to hook up with. One hilarious and vivid image from the book: When Weetzie and Dirk meet up for breakfast the morning after a duck hunt, a cart of rubbery pickles wheels past, and Dirk winces, presumably unpleasantly reminded of whatever he and his duck got up to the night before. Oh my!

(Several of Francesca Lia Block’s novels have been on banned-book lists. In her own words from this 2009 interview with the Kids’ Right to Read Project: “I’m a bit surprised in one way [that my books have been at the center of censorship controversies], because the message of all of them is love, tolerance and self-expression. On the other hand, I am not surprised because the message of all of them is love, tolerance and self-expression.”)

Did Weetzie Bat’s content warp me? Nope. I was already warped; Weetzie Bat helped me feel more acceptable. The same is true of Sarah Bird’s novels of the mid- to late-eighties, Alamo House and The Boyfriend School. Those books were my bibles throughout junior high and high school. They taught me how to take my sharp yearning for boys’ attention and turn it into something funny, something normal, something my friends and I could cackle over. Instead of being the victim or the reject, I could become the arch comedienne, the one holding the strings of the marionettes and making them dance.

Perhaps most influentially, those books were about friendships, connections among women that were strong and complicated and essential to survival — pretty much what my own friendships in high school were.

Weetzie Bat, Alamo House, The Boyfriend School: Three books that helped me become a stronger, more self-realized young woman. There are so many other books that could also be included on this list. (I considered including Richard Adams’s fantasy novel Maia, a dark, twisted tale that speaks so eloquently about the politics of power and sexuality, but that deserves an essay all its own.)

It gives me a pang of regret to think some girls might not get to read these books if their parents or school administrators or local librarians believe they’re Doing The Right Thing by declaring them off limits. On the other hand, the idea of girls finding and reading them in secret, of reading as a dangerous, defiant and revolutionary act — well, it could be worse.

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