Chapter 1’s discussion of the expectations adolescent women face intrigues me, but I question a couple of aspects of it. On page 11, she writes,

this version of adolescent womanhood has cultivated an expectation that young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships without facing the challenges that confront young people whose race, class, and/or sexuality sets them outside of this narrow definition. Largely free from the oppression, rejection, and other trials that mark many young people’s experiences, the adolescent women presented in popular culture generally concern themselves with the friendships and romances that are understood to be the foundations of social acceptance and markers of maturation into adulthood.

This is an important point; race, poverty, and sexualities other than the most heteronormative are minimized in many of the most popular YA novels. Clearly, there are exceptions, but I question Day’s claim that representations of adolescent women in popular culture have cultivated an expectation that “young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.” The fact that TV teenagers never do homework or study for the SATs would seem to contribute to this expectation also. When I was a teenager, the teachers, cultural messages, and social climate I experienced did not encourage adolescent women to cultivate interpersonal relationships—with social consciousness or otherwise. All that mattered was hard work, good grades, and performance, and emotion and intimacy were frowned upon as distractions. Books and TV shows offered refuge largely as a means of vicariously experiencing life as an adolescent girl without such pressures and discouragements.

This wasn’t just an authoritarian message; what I perceived to be mainstream social culture among adolescents also discouraged disclosure of emotions and intimacy. I’m curious if others had the same experience. After all, I came of age in the late 90s when grunge and macho “alternative” rock dominated the airwaves and unisex combat boots were all the rage. Compared to the present glittery era of Katy Perry and Twilight fandom, the 90s didn’t offer the adolescent woman (or anyone) much mainstream cultural material to validate or redeem her emotions or even longings for childish prettiness unless she could cast those emotions in terms of a particular flavor of angst. But has that indeed changed in the present era? My students seem willing to open up and tell me personal details about themselves in their writing; they’ll admit all the sappy romantic books and movies they like. Pop culture seems a thousand times more encouraging of intimate relationships and acceptance of one’s own tender emotions without embarrassment than it did in my day. Yet teenagers still seem to suffer the bad rap of being surly and difficult, and some pieces I’ve read recently about the concept of “underlife” in the classroom have suggested that fear of vulnerability and rejection continues to manifest as a kind of obligatory, cynical culture of coolness and stoicism among adolescents. I’m interested if anyone has any thoughts on this; a certain conception of adolescence seems fundamental to Day’s argument and I wonder how well it holds up otherwise.

I was slightly puzzled by Chapter 5. Day discusses several novels in diary form, observing each fictional diarist’s simultaneous insistence on total privacy and awareness (and construction) of a reader other than herself. While I enjoyed the chapter, I’m not sure I agree with Day’s conclusions (that may be too strong a word). Day contends that the seeming contradiction between a diarist’s longing for privacy and awareness of a reader is resolved by the narrative intimacy made possible by “Lamarque’s ‘logical gap’ between fictional narrator and real reader” (149). The diarist risks too much rejection in disclosing her true thoughts to the people in her life and/or culture discourages her from making such disclosures, but the distance between her and the real reader’s ontological realities insulates her from any rejection or disruption precipitated by the disclosure. As the diarist matures and develops her ability to make honest disclosures to those around her, she no longer needs to write to the reader in the other dimension.*

While I agree with Day’s analysis in general, she seems to deemphasize the fact that diary novels often feature a distinct narrator and implied author. Mia Thermopolis doesn’t describe New York City tourist destinations to convey that she, Mia, understands her diary is really quite public; she describes them because Meg Cabot is the author of Mia’s diary and Cabot can weave text written from Mia’s private perspective together with audience-pleasing detail. To the extent the reader doubts that the real Mia would include such information without expectation of an audience, she can overlook the lapse because the detail is, indeed, pleasing. There are often moments in epistolary and diary novels when the (implied) author winks at the reader through the narrator’s confessions; no young adult reader really believes that the diary novel she picks up is a real person’s diary written in secret. Readers can simultaneously observe certain transparencies and suspend disbelief. In the first chapter, Day presents Seymour Chatman’s 1978 diagram of the intermediary positions between real author and real reader, and I would have liked to see her return to these terms in this discussion, if only to tell us why they don’t apply here.

*Did Day’s book (especially Chapter 6) repeatedly remind anyone else of Bastian and Atreyu communicating and even moving between their respective ontological realities in The Neverending Story? I’m sure plenty has been written on this, but it never occurred to me to interpret The Neverending Story as a metaphor for fan fiction and now it seems clear. Fantasia nearly ceases to be, and Bastian saves it by essentially entering its ontological reality; he continues to write the story, not as the original author, but from the perspective of original narratee, reimagining his engagement with the text.