In Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young, Sara Day builds her argument around the idea of narrative intimacy, a kind of “narrator-reader relationship that reflects, models, and reimagines intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share.” (3) Accordingly, one of the outcomes of narrative intimacy is the blurring of boundaries between fictional story and real reading experience. Although she limits her analysis to literary texts, Day recognizes that “film and TV Shows, likewise, often allow for the possibility of narrative intimacy by employing voiceovers and other techniques that allow the main character to communicate thoughts and feelings to the viewer without revealing them to other characters within the fictional space of the story.” (24)

A first person voice over narration integrates what, ever since Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto, published in 1919, has been known as the “omniscient nature of the cine-eye.” Voice-overs thus allow the audience to explore the psychological interiority of a character and, by doing so, to strengthen the empathetic relationship it builds with her/him. This technique is often responsible for making us “feel like our friend is telling [us] a story,” (3) similarly to the fan of The Princess Diaries mentioned in the opening of Day’s book.

Voice over narration has been employed in a number of film and television productions aimed at young adults. Day brings up examples such as Felicity (a drama television series that ran from 1998 to 2002 on The WB), and Easy A (a 2010 teen comedy, the plot of which is loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter). Television shows hold a particularly interesting position in relation to the idea of narrative intimacy proposed by Day, because the very seriality of the format has been linked to the development of parasocial interactions between viewers and characters by scholars in multiple fields. In a nutshell, parasocial relationships can be defined as:

one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars. (Source: “Parasocial Relationships: The Nature of Celebrity Fascinations” – My apologies for employing such an unorthodox source, hopefully this is acceptable on a blog post!)

Cristel Antonia Russell and Barbara Stern have observed that

over the course of watching multiple episodes of a television series […] viewers can become actively vested in the characters whose lives they closely follow and care about, and sometimes begin to interact with them as if they were real, in a parasocial way. Thus, long-term viewing is essential to the attachment process over time, a process in which viewers develop attitudes toward the characters, get to know them, experience feelings of intimacy with them, and engage in vicarious participation in their lives […]. The process resembles the developmental progression of “real” relationships […], during which communication with the other […] and understanding of him or her increases in tandem with familiarity. (Russell and Stern, “Consumers, Characters, and Products.”, 7)

Parasocial relationships, just like narrative intimacy, are put into effect by the audience’s attempt to fill the Lamarquian “logical gap” between characters and viewers (i.e., the impossibility for viewers/readers to communicate with characters) brought into play by Day. (18) It is my understanding that, whereas the creation of a common space between the characters of a story and the audience to vicariously experience emotions is intrinsic to serial television, the employment of first person voice over narration is required for the development of narrative intimacy. I thus locate in parasocial theory the very foundations for the concept of literary intimacy brought forward by Sara Day, and I was surprised to find out that she never refers to it in her study.

While reading Reading like a Girl, several television shows for teenagers that potentially construct narrative intimacy through their protagonists’ voice overs came to mind, and I was debating whether I wanted to focus this post on My So-Called Life (1994-1995), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Suburgatory (2011-2014), or Hart of Dixie (2011-2015). However, once I got through chapter five (“What if Someone Reads it?”) I realized Awkward., a teen-com-drama created by Lauren Iungerich that’s been airing on MTV since 2011, would be the most interesting to bring up for discussion.

The show chronicles the coming of age of Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards), who starts a blog (“Invisible Girl Daily”) as a way to cope with her struggle with identity and her position as an outcast in high school. In Awkward., the audience is allowed to access the main character’s thoughts through both Jenna’s witty voice-overs and her online blogging practices – both places standing as locations of disclosure working towards the development of narrative intimacy with the audience.

The series tackles some of the same themes (all of them quite typical of young adult literature and television, such as irresponsible parenting, teen alienation, high school popularity, first, second, and third loves) as Alyson Noel’s Cruel Summer, one of the texts analyzed by Day. However, what’s more important for my analysis, is that both works examine questions of “private versus public disclosure” (176) and “bring […] private and public genres into conversation with one another in order to investigate [the protagonist’s] complicated experience of disclosure and discretion.” (174)

The audience’s privileged viewpoint on Jenna’s life is built on three levels: first, through the camera-eye we are allowed to witnesses the unfolding of the events as they take place. Second, through her voice overs, she trusts us – sometimes even more than her best friends Tamara (Jillian Rose Reed) and Ming (Jessica Lu) – with her confessions and her innermost thoughts. Third, by giving us access to her blog and her writing process, we witness the shaping of her virtual persona (i.e. an actively constructed presentation of herself).

Furthermore, Day proposes that “the female tradition of personal writing simultaneously invites opportunities for expressive release, guilt, and fictive construction.” (147) Coherently, the show often hints at the therapeutic function of personal writing (Jenna refers to her blog as her “go-to method of problem solving”). As Trevor Kelley beautifully phrased it: “Ideally the blogging experience should feel a little bit like emo yoga. […] Venting about an unrequited crush can—and should—serve as a sort of emo version of Shavasana.” (Trevor Kelley and Leslie Simmon, Everybody Hurts, 86). Thereupon, I am going to speculate that, in Awkward., the depiction of blogging as more than just online-gut-spilling, also serves a didactic function for the audience, which is encouraged to take up writing as a healing and constructive practice, especially during adolescence. Now, on this last remark, the show follows the trajectory of other works analyzed by Day: as the series progresses and Jenna advances through high school and into college, the entries on her journal become less frequent, and blogging give way to other forms of creative writing (one of the subplots in season three revolves around Jenna’s venture into the realms of fiction and poetry).

Finally, I think it’s worth to point out how the series’ producers have cleverly been employing social media to further blur the line between fiction and reality. In addition to recreating Jenna’s blog on Tumblr, the audience has been occasionally invited to reply to the (apparently) rhetorical questions posed by the protagonist through her voice-overs and blog entries. Such seeming possibilities of interaction with Jenna’s fictional world provide the audience with the illusion of bridging the logical gap. For example, when, torn between two lovers, Jenna asks herself whether she should get back with her former lover (Matty McKibben/Beau Mirchoff) or stay with her current boyfriend (Jake Rosati/Brett Davern), the hashtags #teammatty and #teamjake were superimposed on the screen, inviting the audience to voice their opinion – in other words, to give Jenna their advice – via Twitter. In addition to functioning as a form of cross-promotion for the show, these actions also undeniably foster the audience’s sense of involvement and thus develop even further the narrative intimacy between viewer and protagonist.