read, write, repeat.

5 minutes ago, I finished Megan McCafferty’s Perfect Fifths, the final installment to her Jessica Darling series.

I was 16, desperate and miserable, when I stumbled upon McCafferty’s (and Jessica’s) debut, Sloppy Firsts, in the adult section of my public library. I had a brief flashback to reading a dog-eared copy of YM years earlier (YM was my first teen-magazine love, and I read those copies over and over and over again at the age 13, certain that I was learning how to be a teenager, not yet aware that I was really just absorbing packaged, mass-produced adolescence of a kind that was more perfect than mine would ever be) that had recommended it as a good book to “take to camp and read aloud with your bunkmates”. Although cover’s design reminded me of more adolescent fare, it was in the adult section, and this intrigued me. I checked it out, and had devoured it entirely an hour or so later. 

I loved Sloppy Firsts. Loved. As a fellow obsessive-journaler, hyper-observant, malaise’d teenage girl, I quickly identified with Jessica. Sloppy Firsts, I felt, truly chronicled what it was like to be an intelligent teenage girl in high school. Unlike so many other books, it didn’t over-romanticize teenagehood (Art Geeks and Prom Queens, I’m looking at you.). And unlike the “real” literature I was reading at the time, I really connected with it. I feel that, so often, people look down on books like Sloppy Firsts, assuming (incorrectly) that they’re chick-lit fare, and also that they’re not as worthy of reading as Dickens and Ayn Rand and Ray Bradbury and Harper Lee and the other things you’re assigned to read in high school. I was intelligent, I was reading classic literature, but it wasn’t speaking to me the way McCafferty did through Sloppy Firsts.

Why do we write books like these off as less-than-literary, just mindless fluff? Is it because they’re about teenage girls? Are the experiences of teenage girls inherently fluffy and non-serious? I don’t think so, not at all. The Bell Jar is another book I identified with for this reason. It’s a little different because it’s usually included in the canon of literature, but it’s the same in that it spoke to me in my own voice. My much-read copy is filled with underlining because, reading it, I couldn’t get over how Sylvia Plath seemed to write about things that I’d thought I’d been the only one to feel, but had never been able to express. 

Back to Jessica Darling. We weren’t mirror images, but I definitely identified. Marcus Flutie was never the series’ main attraction for me; I know Jessica and Marcus’ relationship is the major draw for many. Jessica was the major draw; I understood how lonely she felt, and how writing was the only escape, and on and on - I was excited to read her story, to hear how she got out and became someone and grew up out of the awful malaise of being 16.

After I finished it, I was disappointed to learn that the other two books in the series (then, the only ones published) were out. I went away for the summer, and when I got back in the Fall, they were out yet again. I put them both on hold, and in October, I finally got my hands on them.

Even more disillusioned with high school and teenagehood, I devoured Second Helpings with a similar appetite. I loved it. Jessica and I were both in our final years of high school, and reading about her misery seemed to provide more validation for my own. Jessica was still intelligent, snarky, thinking of bigger things, while still incredibly grounded in the high school world she claimed to hate (teenagers might hate high school, but that’s where they are, and so it becomes their whole universe anyways - or, at least, so it was with me and Jessica). Some things about it were a little cheesy, but we can’t all be Esther Greenwood. I enjoyed the little bits of cheese alongside the snark.

I was excited to read the next installment, to take place at Columbia! My self-proclaimed pseudo-alter-ego was finally leaving high school, and I was going to go along too, and relish in all things university, which, to me, was tantalizingly far away at that point.

I felt cheated by Charmed Thirds. Jessica had changed somehow into someone who I felt an intense connection with, to someone who I disliked. I wanted to shake her and tell her that she was finally out of high school, she was finally free! I couldn’t stand what I perceived as her whiny voice as she complained about her life at Columbia. What I didn’t understand, then, was that university is not a cure-all for other less-than-satisfactory things in your life, but I still maintain that Jessica was far more miserable than she had any right to be. I wrote an impassioned journal entry about this. Her relationship with Marcus took up too much of the book, in my opinion; it was here that the series stopped being about Jessica’s growth and, instead, became a book about JessicaAndMarcus and what will happen next? It felt a little too teen-romance for me, which is not how I wanted my high-school-escapism to be.

Fourth Comings was a disappointment as well, albeit less than Charmed Thirds. By then, the Jessica Darling spell (which had reached its peak in the moments between finishing Second Helpings and starting Charmed Thirds) had mostly broken, and so I felt the disappointment less keenly. The storyline of Fourth Comings intrigued me more - the characters, once again, felt richly fleshed out. But - Jessica seemed…sad to me, in a pathetic way. Her hyper-observant, overly-analytic nature was something I identified with and commiserated with in high school, but, as a young, recently graduated twentysomething, it felt tired. Jessica and I were no longer equals (in terms of our ages, both physical and mental, or our locations), but I didn’t even want her as a role model. She was whiny and entitled, and there was still so much focus on her relationship with Marcus Flutie, a relationship I never really understood. I can buy that in the Darlingverse, Jessica and Marcus are soulmates, whatever, fine. But I never understood why Jessica liked him so much as an adult - as a teenager, he made sense, he was the mysterious brooder who was so much more than he seemed, cliched but whatever - as an adult, he seemed pretentious and irritating. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on Jessica, shouldn’t have expected her to behave or act like an adult - the closer I get to 20 myself, the more horrified I am by the idea that I ever thought of a 20-year-old as an adult (although, in my defence, I think 23 is much different than 20), but when I read it as a 17-year-old anxiously awaiting my freshman year of university, it seemed to me that Jessica ought to have outgrown Marcus.

But she didn’t, and in Perfect Fifths, she runs into him again, after having rejected his proposal in the previous instalment. She’s far less whiny in this novel, but I still fail to understand the continuous appeal of Marcus Flutie, or why he is supposed to be her soulmate (or, frankly, why he is supposed to be some unbelievable girl-magnent, as he always sounded physically repugnant to me, in addition to being a pretentious douche). The book was not written in the series’ trademark journal-style, and it all occurred over one day. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It wasn’t bad. It was just…not good. Jessica is no longer the interesting, compelling character I grew to love four years ago. The entire resolution to the book read like something Jessica would have mocked in high school. Maybe that’s part of the point, part of Jessica growing up, but it doesn’t really read that way to me. Jessica remarks, to Marcus, at one point that, “Thinking about all those vitally important issues from my sophomore year only made me embarrassed for my former self,” - and I disagree with this entirely. Those issues might have been juvenile, but Jessica was a product of her time and place. If I were her, I’d be more embarrassed by my current self, seeing as Jessica and Marcus spend a shuttle ride exchanging haikus. Really?

The entire book seemed like Jessica becoming the giddily happy teenager she never was even as a teenager. Jessica Darling, who I was so excited to see grow up into someone kick-ass, became a sappy, self-absorbed whiner still playing dumb games with her high school boyfriend.

So, Perfect Fifths was…to put it in McCafferty’s own terms, “notso” - as in, notso perfect (Jessica’s nickname is Notso, as in Jessica Notso Darling, in case you didn’t know). 

But, in spite of the lackluster quality of the last three books, I still feel that the first two were so good they almost make up for it. And here’s what I respect Megan McCafferty for most of all: 

After her books were called dumb teenage crap in 2006 during a plagiarism scandal, McCafferty said, “These very elitest comments about ‘how all books for teens are crap; so isn’t this just crap stealing from crap’. My books are not crap.” In response to an opinion letter in the NYT calling teen books “undemanding literature for undemanding readers”, she said that “There’s so much good writing for teenagers now. People make across the board judgements.” 

Teen literature, unfortunately, is often grouped together in one clump, especially when it has to do with teenage girls. That’s like saying all mystery novels are of the same calibre and appeal to the same audience. It’s simply not true; and, what’s more, it’s deeply insulting to both the judged and the judger. Books like Sloppy Firsts and Prep were and are not undemanding literature for undemanding readers. Rather, they were examples of literature that spoke to me and treated my concerns as real and legitimate. They weren’t fluffy, escapist literature, they weren’t chicklit. They were well-written, engaging novels who happened to feature teenage girls in high school as their protagonists; teenage girls who angsted about boys, yes, but why was that so shameful? Romantic entanglements are a normal part of life, and Jessica and Lee were concerned with many other things as well. 

I strongly feel that this type of judgment is cast upon female teen literature, because teen girls are seen as unimportant, unintelligent people who are mostly concerned with boys, their looks, and other shallow things - unless they are consciously working to eschew their teenage-girl-dom. No one demands this of teenage boys - no one asks them to turn their back on their ilk, possibly because the general view of their ilk isn’t as degrading. 

The concerns of teenage girls are not inherently fluffy, and to think that about teenage girls and teenage-girl-centric literature is far more sexist and insulting than the message many think “teen chick lit” conveys.

Thank you, Megan. Despite what I may have thought about your last three books, your first two gave my 16-year-old self a pal to commiserate with, and made me feel a little less alone, and a little less like a freak. They were well-written, and I will defend them as literature all my life.

Thank you.