In Wintertgirls,
Laurie Halse Anderson disassembles a very troubled teenager. It’s almost a
therapy session, but one page into it, we can’t help but like and almost admire
her protagonist, Lia. And soon, very soon, be terribly afraid of her.
Lia’s very good at convincing herself that she’s wrong. Her
interior battles take place in interior monologues with strikeout text, bursts
of self-loathing, and very bad decisions. Her outward impulses are generous and
thoughtful. However, she is trapped in an echo chamber that is coming to light
more these days.
She is dying from words.
The brilliance of the book is that it makes for a great
read. I’m resisting any adjectives like “searing” because they fall short, and
are overused. There is a fishhook quality to this book. I flinched on every
page, and couldn’t escape needing to know the outcome. The bait was constantly
replenished, too – deft characterization (I knew who Elijah was the moment he
appeared), hard scenery (every place is a place we’ve seen, often in pain), and
high tension.
Anderson’s book is more than brilliant. It’s also good. It’s
part of what should be a national conversation about the terrifying new stresses
our social and media environment puts on teens. Maybe we shouldn’t complain so
much. Our distant ancestors lived, if they were fortunate, to the ripe, old age
of 25 or 30. Kids today (don’t read this in a “get off my lawn” voice), at
least in most of the developed world, do not want for physical comfort, food,
educational opportunities. The disparities of wealth and access to power that
do exist are even highlighted by some as examples of how wealthy we are.
So why should we be concerned with girls who have negative
self-images? what is the difference between body image issues and self-esteem?
Low self-esteem weeds the winners from the losers. This is
very useful if you need to cull the children in order to have enough food for
adults, and if the adults all have to be hard as nails. We have drifted from
that – well, for some, it’s an ideal – to the principle that happiness is a
human’s right, at least to pursue, if not obtain. And if we’re all equal (again
with the Enlightenment ideals), then we should stop culling ther children, and
let them develop in their happy differences.
In so many respects, this works. We have consumer-protection
laws that reduce the incidence of lead in children’s toys because it’s bad for
them. We stopped accepting child labor (onshore) because we felt bad for the
kids. There are foundations today focused on evening out the opportunities in
schools, because we feel bad for the kids.
And bullying is making the news increasingly as a threat to
our kids. It has always existed. It’s long been a concern of parents, more
recently one of politicans, to restrict it, or to ignore it as natural, a way
of sorting out the bosses from the followers.
One strain of bullying affects teenage girls’ self-image.
And it’s not only bullying by kids against kids. It’s bullying by our entire
society against kids. The reason, I think, lies in the use of concept marketing
instead of product marketing.
Do you ever see a fat person drinking soda in a commercial?
Do you ever see sick people going to the beach in paradise on an airline
commercial? How about car ads? Drug rehab center ads on late-night tv?
We ingest a steady diet of these images, and tney become us.
We are what we eat. And the difference between the ideal and the real causes
pain to some, and is a stick others (bullies) use against them.
Anderson’s Lia is that girl. She’s trapped. She doesn’t need
the bikini models to tormet her anymore. She is so far past them, she can taunt
them instead.
If you can face Lia’s demons, you ought to give this book a
read.
