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The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
01:33:19
Do you remember what it was like to feel infinite?
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- [00:00]
Jeff O'Neill
This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by Thriftbooks.com so we get to talk about books like today's episode, the Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, a 90s into 2000s hit about high school, one of the great modern high school novels. And there's really two editions you can get and both of them have something to recommend themselves. There are paperbacks that use the original cover. I guess you could find a first edition. I'm not seeing any of those available here, but there's a 20th anniversary edition that has like a 20th anniversary sticker on it of original cover in paperback that also includes a new letter from Charlie, the main character at the end, about what they've sort of been up to. And maybe you want that. That's not in the original. That's not in some of the first printing, first edition paperbacks that came out. I also really like the movie tie in edition of this. I think the one I saw, it just feels so 90s. It just feels of a time and a place. That one you can get for as little as $5. Thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. You can get free shipping on orders of $15 or more in the US and every purchase gets you closer to a free book reward, like a paperback movie tie in edition of this book. All right, time for the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Get ready to get emo today because we are talking about the millennial young adult classic the Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I should have done black eyeliner. Jeff.
- [01:32]
Jeff O'Neill
So this is a, it's fascinating because this is a book I know we've talked about over the years. Like it's something we both read, we both enjoy, we both think is interesting and it came out at an important time for you, but it's about an important time for me. So it's like it's very strangely distributed over our shared adolescence and then our reading lives and then where it sits among other stories about being in high school in America and white and heterosexual. Like, we get all those things into there and how that becomes a template. It's part of a long tradition. And we were talking about this, what we're going to talk about in our office hours a little bit later, thinking about what the classics of coming of age stories are, but then also like how our own high school experiences either resonate or don't with this. And this is always the tricky part of these kinds of stories, right? They need to be specific and universal at the time. They age pretty quickly out of the specifics. But then since it's sort of the same, or has been sort of the same, as I'm going to argue here in a minute, until like since like the 1950s, every generation needs their version of what the music was and what the drugs were and what the sexual politics were. And this is a frozen moment in time. And yet I think it has existed into the future in ways that a lot of these stories don't.
- [02:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
Rebecca yeah, I totally agree. This feels like a real time capsule to me. It came out when I was in high school. It's about the years that you were in high school, as you were saying. And it is so much about just like that experience, experience of being a teenager. I think this was a pretty universal template or one of the stories made out of that universal template of coming of age from the 50s up until about the smartphone era. But I feel like that has really changed. The teenagers that I'm around at least these days aren't super into era defining music that's specific to their experiences. And they're also not super into like a shared set of movies or TV shows. It seems like we don't have a monoculture anymore and this story exists inside sort of one of the last moments where teenagers had real shared like one clear set of shared reference points. At least white teenagers in the suburbs, in big cities of Pittsburgh, that it both feels like a time capsule of a specific time, but also like one of the last of its kind that's possible to tell. Not that we don't have coming of age stories now, but what they're doing is a little bit different because the media that kids are interacting with is so different now.
- [04:03]
Jeff O'Neill
And there's a bunch of interesting structural choices the author makes. We'll talk about all those things and get into the story here in a little bit more. Click on the Show Note link in the Show Notes to sign up for the free newsletter. Vanessa, I'm sure will have all kinds of interesting emo related information from us. Take a trip back to the early 90s, which believe it or not is like 40 years ago at this point. And there's also you can sign up to be a member of the Patreon. There's a couple paid options. One includes early Ad Freed episodes and and another includes that and bonus content. And we're going to do some office hours time and take a memory lane down trip down to high school. You can always email us at 0 to well read book riot. Com. We've gotten some nice emails from high school teachers recently and the high school teachers out there. I want to hear from you about perks of being a wallflower.
- [04:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [04:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Like what if you know the book after listening to us talk, I'd be fascinated to know. I have a 15 year old in my house, like literally in my house. And we are doing this period from I'm older than the parents in this book, which is a real head trip for this particular person. And I would like to know if this holds up or how does it hold up? I was thinking about recommending it to my kids and I'm, I'm pausing not because of like the material, but I'm just not sure they'd be into it and I'm not sure they wouldn't be into it at this point. So I'm interested in data.
- [05:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
I would like to fly in for the focus group with your kids who are thoughtful, smart readers. And I do want to hear our teenagers today still picking this up. They were in 2012 when the movie came out. The book had a major surge, but that was again like a really different cultural moment than we're in right now. And I suspect that if teenagers are circling around certain coming of age stories, this is no longer one of them. But I would kind of be delighted to hear that it is because also the kids these days are into the millennial music.
- [05:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes. So you think the smartphone is a flashpoint? My flashpoint here is. I guess we'll just get into it here in, in this book, Rebecca, and you have it in your notes and it wasn't going to be in yours. I would have to put into it the idea that this 15 year old thinks there are other 15 year olds out there that don't know or may not know what masturbation is. Is. I don't even know what you would call it. I'm not sure what that is because we One difference, at least in my socioeconomic demographic, political cohort, is the talk about sex in your bodies is way, way, way front of mind, talked about very early. And I think maybe the biggest thing that's changed since this book came out. And I wonder if there's transitional works of art or movies or stories where the idea of teenagerness being difficult to navigate, penetrated into the parental core. Right, because in say, the John Hughes movies that immediately precede this. I think it very much is 90s versions of 80s John Hughes movies. But then, but before John Green and like the modern YA movement, like at some point I've made this. I think I've made this observation to you and others that I don't know that our parents generation. I'm going to lump you in with me again, Rebecca. I'm sorry. Was thinking too much about good parenting and thinking about what their kids were going through as adolescents. Whereas many, many people, I would say all the people in my friend group in court think about this a lot and maybe obsessively. And that's how we get helicopter parents.
- [07:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [07:37]
Jeff O'Neill
I think, I don't know how that may or may not be related to smartphone, but I think that's as big of a difference that might be more important than the lack of a monoculture for how this book is aged. Rebecca, what do you think about that?
- [07:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's a really good theory. Let me tell the people briefly what it's about.
- [07:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm so, I'm so getting on my adult.
- [07:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
There's so much to. There is so much to talk about. But I think that's a really nice way into the conversation. So. The book is set in 1991. It's about a 15 year old named Charlie who is growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and he is the titular wallflower of the story. It's his freshman year of high school. He has always felt like he's on the outside of life. But he is especially lonely coming into this freshman year because his best friend died of suicide last year and he's still holding on to some stuff. We know from the very beginning that Charlie has been hospitalized for mental health treat for various past issues and trauma in his life. He doesn't use the word trauma, which is notable and also a real artifact of the time in which the book came out. But Charlie is one of those kids who like, he's really sensitive. He thinks too much about everything. His feelings are really big. They're often scary and he doesn't have anybody to talk to. So he starts writing letters to an unnamed recipient. It's someone that he's heard is a good person and he thinks that he can trust this person. He's never met them. He doesn't want the recipient to know who his real. What his real identity is. And the text of those letters is what makes up the book. So Charlie is just writing to this person. He always writes as dear friend about loneliness and depression. And anxiety. But again, like, he's not using that language because this is still the early 90s. He's writing about family issues, and eventually he writes about the deep, like, wonderful joy of making a few close friends. These two seniors, Sam and Patrick, who are step sister, stepbrother, befriend him, and he finally feels like he has somewhere to belong. So the book is set over the course of Charlie's freshman year, and he's chronicling this wild adolescent ride. His first crush, his first sexual experiences. Experimenting with smoking and drinking and drugs and eventually revealing the childhood trauma that he is discovering continues to impact him. Along the way, he runs into most of YA literature's greatest hits, like peer pressure, bullying, rape, domestic violence, teen pregnancy,
- [10:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Supporting what isn't here, Rebecca? Like, we have to almost have, like, what isn't on the Bingo.
- [10:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
The real kitchen sink of teen angst and teen issues. He's got a close friend who is secretly gay. And yes, he also does have a very special English teacher who helps him see himself in a new way. A real classic of the coming of age genre.
- [10:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, in a way. I think you have this note a little bit further. Like, just. It's all jammed in and it's not very long. Like, it happens quite quickly. It's compressed because of the nature of it, which is it's told in these letters, but they're also after the fact. Right. Every time we get a letter, he's recounting something that's already happened, and it gets quite compressed. Right. We don't have these interstitial periods of waiting for this thing to happen. He's only writing when something notable has occurred. So you're getting sort of the highest highs and the lowest lows of, like, I'm now hospitalized versus we were driving around a car with the windows down, listening to music, and Aren't we infinite? And all the things that go like that. So that part of it's very strange, but it is. What are we even missing here, Rebecca? Like, I don't even know. Because he's younger. He himself isn't going through the transition out of the house to college, but he's seeing kids that are.
- [11:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. He's seeing kids that are leaving. He's got an older brother who's in his freshman year of college this year. So he's hearing about that. Really, what's missing from a contemporary American story is any consideration of race.
- [11:28]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [11:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
You know, everybody, like, I just watched the movie for the first time. Everybody in the movie is white. It's sort of Implied or assumed that most of the characters in the book are white. All the main characters are white. And that would certainly be different today. We know that the suburbs aren't all white now in 2026. Not that they were in 1991, but representations and how teen peer groups are presented, like, this is just not in Charlie's consciousness at all. And it's not in the consciousness of anybody around him.
- [11:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. What. The long life of this is interesting because it was published at the end of the Millennium, 1999, as the 90s were ending. And it's a very 90s book. Like, it begins in 1991, follows, you know, really through the year 91 into 92. We get nirvana references. Then we get also the references of the kids that like Nirvana. We get the Smiths references before that. And this was where ya, at least in print, was not a big thing yet, at least as it would come to be, really, in movies. It's interesting, I was reading Cameron Crowe's biography and the success of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was a shock. And even that is about. It's so funny to think about this. That's about someone who didn't have the high school experience going into a high school. Like, that's how Cameron. Like, it's very. It's all very meta. Right. Even. And I was going to. I'm going to suggest early. Later in the show, we'll talk about this. Like, even in American Graffiti, which is kind of as early as I could think back of, like, that's George Lucas in the 70s looking back at the late 50s of his own adolescence, even that is laden with nostalgia. Right. So from the very beginning, there is this always looking back, being reflective. This is Chbosky looking at his own adolescence, right? From. He's more the English teacher character than the kid at this particular moment. So there's always this reflective nature of it. And here it's built into the. It's built into the structure of the text. Because even Charlie is looking back from letter to letter and sort of processing his own experiences at the same time, which I think is very important to think about. But that's also something we were doing in the 90s. We're very self. That's where emo comes from. We're thinking about our own thinking in ways that weren't always healthy.
- [13:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's an interesting shift from the types of media, the books and movies that came before it, that were. That were really nostalgic about the high school experience. Even like, I mean, Grease is a Classic of the genre, but this is more like high school is really hard. And, you know, Judy Blume did this before we talk about it in Forever. But that book is more specific to sort of a sexual coming of age. It's not. It's not as much broadly about the high school teenage experience. And Chbosky is not nostalgic. It doesn't seem, for high school. The characters are not. They're not in love with the difficulties of their experience, but they have that thing that teenagers have where you start to become aware for the first time that you're experiencing something you'll never experience again. And they sort of have a. There's a dreaminess and sort of a romanticizing of a lot of their experiences that, like, as Charlie grows up, maybe he's not nostalgic for the whole thing of being a teenager, but there are some really beautiful parts of it. So, yeah, this is like white hot center of millennial adolescence. I'm the oldest, like, in the eldest millennial group. And I was. I was a sophomore in high school, a junior in high school when this came out. It was published by MTV Books, which is the most millennial thing about it. MTV Books was a partnership or was an imprint of Pocketbooks, which is Simon and Schuster imprint. And like in real mid-90s form. MTV announces this project in 1996 with a contest called the Right Stuff W R I T E. The winner would get a $5,000 check and a contract with MTV Books to be the launch title for the imprint. And writers had to be under the age of 24 because MTV wanted. Yeah. To keep it young and cool. The winning title was a book called Floating by Robin Troy, which came out in 1998 and was deemed a total dud. So, like, Perks of Being, like, really, it's bad. Perks of Being a Wallflower was the second book from MTV Books, but right to this day is like the Signal book. In fact, like, if you just do a casual Google, you will be told by many sources that this was the launch title for MTV Books. But this is the only recognizable title today that MTV Books published. Comes out in February of 99. It sold 100,000 copies in the first year and a half and then more than 700 by 200 by 2007. So it gains steam. Like, I remember this book being passed hand to hand and from friend to friend, but not a hit with critics. Kind of one of the unique titles of books that we're going to talk about on Zero to well read. Like Publishers Weekly called it Trite. Kirkus called it a ripoff of Salinger. The New York Times didn't even bother writing about it until the adaptation came out in 2012, but the kids loved it, and many teens, in fact, credited the book with saving their lives and now has more than 2 million Goodreads ratings and an average of 4.24 stars, which is high. So I think this is one of those where, like, the adults not getting it is a feature, not a bug.
- [16:53]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. And then one of the reasons that probably that star rating stays high is because people like us aren't reading this book just because, like, they're finding it. When you're a teenager, finding it, when it's getting a recommended, maybe a librarian, maybe the movie, maybe it's just out there in the culture enough that it can be picked up and recirculated. And I'd be curious, too, because, I mean, what's nuts to think about is we're not that much farther. I mean, in 1991, we were not that much farther away from Catcher in the Rye than we are from Perks of Being a Wallflower right now.
- [17:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right.
- [17:25]
Jeff O'Neill
And we will get to Catcher in the Rye at some point in reading this. To be honest with you, Rebecca, I was like, why aren't we doing Catcher in the Rye? But that's a whole nother conversation.
- [17:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's on the calendar, Jeff, that we
- [17:34]
Jeff O'Neill
will get to at some point. It's fine. It's. It's totally fine. I think part of what we're trying to do is mix up and turn. We don't want to go sort of lockstep through literary history. We'd still be doing Augustine or Marcus Aurelius or something at this point, and. But I do think there's a sense that when you are an adolescent, part of reading something that's at least closest to your time, that feels more familiar is it gets a credibility, that the interiority being represented is also still credible. Right?
- [18:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [18:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Like, is this what it was like to be. I needed to feel like it's contemporary to some degree so that it feels like I can believe these. This story and these characters and their feelings and these emotions. Even if Dia Van Frank could have done the same work for you or something like that, or even if Forever by Judy Blume or a separate piece could have done the same work for you, There is something about. You know, there's a reason the youth pastor dresses that way, Rebecca. There just is. And that's part of why the more modern cultural references, the more modern, the more Modern it can feel. I think a teen then can trust it. A certain kind of a teen.
- [18:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And one of the big functions of young adult literature is to make teens feel seen to give them a sense of you're not alone. You're not the first or only person to have the experiences that you're having. Here's what it can look like. So good and bad examples of things happen and then like through this book and through most YA literature is a real thread also of it gets better. You will make it through this period that feels so angsty. It won't always be this way. And even inside these moments that are so difficult, there can be times of real beauty. So I think that's why YA literature one of the reasons why literature is so persistently interesting to teens but also why we get a new classic for every generation or every micro generation really that reflects back to them. Like what was on the radio when you were having formative experience. This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer prime originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus. Elle every year after the love Hypothesis, Sterling point and more slow burns, second chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting.
- [20:02]
Jeff O'Neill
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- [20:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
When I have a crush on a guy no one knows.
- [20:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Be careful. I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the entire world. Who you wish for. Obsession is 96% fresh on rotten tomatoes.
- [20:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
I love you so so so so much.
- [20:22]
Jeff O'Neill
It's blood soaked nightmare fuel. What kind of spills you put on her? You have been been warned. Obsession. Rated R under 17. Animated without parent only theaters May 15 with special engagements in Dolby Girl.
- [20:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders that perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch.
- [20:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Done.
- [20:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross.
- [21:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Work your magic and to bring it back to Holden Caufield. Like a teenager's phoniness radar is maybe even over attuned to phoniness. So like I think that's a thing that you don't want to be put on as a teenager because I think subconsciously or consciously, we realize as teenagers that there's a lot we don't know. But we also don't want to say that we're just subject to the universe and just tell. I'm completely credulous about everything because I also know that people lie. Things are going in my house that isn't. That aren't talked about. Like there are subterranean truths here. And I need some recognitions that you know that I know that you know that I know that the world is complicated and we're not going to bullshit each other about that.
- [21:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And ya lit tends to have this kitchen sink thing happen because teenagers are running into all of the. The big issues of life at the same time for the first time. Like, it just is that way. You know, trying to figure out sex and drugs and rock and roll and friendships and family and your own personal ethics and how to be a student and what do you care about? Like, it's all so present and so pressing. And I think as an adult, I had this experience when we went back and read Forever and I felt this way with Perks of Being a Wallflower too. It's like, wow, everything is in this book. And adult fiction doesn't really try to do that. But it doesn't have to because we've had more time and more experience. But y. Authors really, like, they really seize the day to be like, you're seeing some shit. I have seen this before you. Let's talk about it. And Stephen Chbosky wasn't that old when he wrote this. He's 29 when the book comes out. So he's in his early to mid-20s when he starts writing it. He was 21 in 1991 when the book is set. So he's pretty close.
- [22:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Even that's interesting to me. I was thinking about that. Why isn't it set in 1985? Is it the John Hughesness of it all? Because he's not writing about his own 15. He's. He's. I was 13 in 1991, so I'm a couple years younger. But it's even I even. I was looking at interviews and I didn't see an argument made for that. I was very interested in that.
- [23:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is interesting. And like, also, then why is it set? Why isn't it set in 1998? Like he.
- [23:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Right before the book comes out.
- [23:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, there's. Who knows?
- [23:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Who knows.
- [23:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
I've never seen him address that. But it's been beloved, this book, that those 2 million Goodreads ratings. There is a film adaptation that comes out in 2012, and the book goes back onto the bestseller list for a whole year, crosses the 2 million copies line in 2013. And then, you know, we talked already about some of the really frank discussions of sexuality and drug use. And there's. There's domestic. Domestic violence. There's, like, really everything happens in this book. But it made then frequent appearances on the American Library Association's list of the most banned and challenged books, like, year after year in the early 2000s because of those frank conversations. And, like, contextually, 1991 and 1999 matter because this book lands right in the middle of purity culture, and the characters are experiencing that, and there are culture wars over sex education. Just a few years before this book comes out, President Clinton's surgeon general, Jocelyn Elders, was forced to resign because she suggested that masturbation should be taught in sex ed curricula as a form of safer sex and as AIDS prevention. And so, like, all of that is around these kids in terms of, like, what their teachers are allowed to say to them, what their parents feel like they should know or don't know. Like, I guess then it's a little more believable that Charlie doesn't know what masturbation is. At the start of this book, no
- [24:41]
Jeff O'Neill
one's talking about masturbation has been out for 30 years. I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure.
- [24:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, but also, like, he has an older brother and he goes to public. Public schools. Like, I mean, I remember the boys making the jack off motion, like, from the Earl. Like, in my earliest consciousness, that's been a joke that teenage boys do, but they're in this real culture. But, like, we're not talking yet about all these things with teenagers. They're experiencing them, but the adults are not having conversations with them about it. And Chbosky kind of slides right in and is like. Like, you can picture the youth pastor flipping his chair around and leaning forward.
- [25:15]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, like, kicking his baseball cap.
- [25:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [25:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. A weird career for Stephen Chbosky. I mean, this is the. This, I think, the singular accomplishment of his life. He's gone on to do movies now, and I think the comps to John Hughes and Cameron Crowe are interesting to make. I mean, he has the book among them, right? The, you know, John Hughes has the hits, and then Cameron Crowe is like, a little bit later, and he has the sort of the music bona fides that the others doesn't. So Chbosky grows up in Pittsburgh he's born in 1970, so he's eight years older than I am. He's a huge reader. And he got involved early with this guy named Stuart Stern, who was a screenwriter who also wrote Rebel Without a Call. So like James Dean being a teenage rebel, it's like built into his artistic and real DNA at the same kind. And that's an interesting movie to think about from a young adult coming age. Where does that fit in?
- [26:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
Somebody takes you under their wing and it turns out he's the screenwriter who created Rebel Robot.
- [26:14]
Jeff O'Neill
Like how could you not write a. And so he gets interested in film and screenwriting, very early independent film. But he had this character in his mind, you know, a hodgepodge. The characters in this book are sort of taken from pieces of his own life and recombined and put back together in different ways. And then he, he wrote this line. I guess that's just one of the perks of being a wallflower. And that for him, as you have in the notes here, was a way into the character. The reading I did it was that plus this idea of it being letters at the same time where it helped him get through this sort of what angle, what voice, how am I going to approach this? But this first person self aware narration. So it's first person narration where in it we are getting. We are meant to believe these are real letters, not just sort of interiority or whatever. Let him unlock sort of how he would approach this character where it's confessional and anonymous and then narrated sort of immediately in the simple past where this happened, then this happened, this happened. And then from there he sort of. I don't know. I. I don't want to say. It's been probably when this book comes out, you're like, wow, we're gonna get a John Greenlight career of some kind. But he ends up being a screenwriter and director. Most notably, wrote, rewrote the screenplay for Emma Watson's version of Beauty and the Beast. Wrote the screenplay for Rent. He's published One other novel, 2019, that was adult. I didn't read this. I don't remember anything about this. I'm not sure what else.
- [27:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it was called Imaginary Friend has.
- [27:48]
Jeff O'Neill
You know, he. He did the adaptation of Wonder, the really great selling RJ Palacio middle grade novel. Also directed the sort of. Luckily the Cats musical movie was such a bomb that I think it wiped out the smaller bomb that was Dear Evan Hansen around the same time time a very, very strange career. Rebecca, I'm not even sure what to say about.
- [28:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, no, it's just interesting. Like this book. It's wild that this is kind of the signal work of Chbosky's career when he doesn't seem to have been setting out to have a career in books at all. Like, he graduated from USC's film school. Most of his work has been, as you were saying, in film. And that like in. In 2000, he edited an anthology of short stories called Pieces. But aside from that 2019 novel, like no other literary ventures, he's worked exclusively in film. So kind of bananas to just like drop in to books and accidentally produce a generation defining work. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what else to say about it. They're like a really interesting guy, but a very unusual career and very unusual career and has really just focused his work around film. He did also write and direct the adaptation of this.
- [29:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Right? I did think. Because I think that the Green book start John green, like in 2004, 2006. So between the time this book is published and the movie comes out, we get the John Green phenomenon too, which seems very much of a piece here.
- [29:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, totally.
- [29:19]
Jeff O'Neill
A little bit darker. I think one of my. Well, I'll save for the hot takes and straight thoughts here in a minute. Let's talk about our own first exposure. Rebecca, you got this right when they were. You were the target demo, I'm guessing. I mean, how else could you be the target demo?
- [29:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I was just. I was right in the middle of the target demo. I was a sophomore or junior in high school in 99. And like I read this, I think right as it came out. I could not tell you how I first became aware of it, but I remember seeing this neon green cover everywhere. And the book is a weird size. It's like a small little square book. But I just have this real sense memory of seeing that. Seeing the MTV Books logo on it. I was reminded, doing my research for the show that MTV ran commercials for the book on mtv. Like, maybe that's like I was coming home from school and watching trl and maybe that's how I saw it. But this was just in the water. Everybody that I knew read it and passed it around. This was my first reread since. But I have remembered that description of. And we'll talk about it later. But this moment of driving, Charlie's driving with his friends and a song comes on the radio. Like, the weather is perfect and he's feeling so happy. And then just everything about the vibe is right. And he says in that moment, we Feel infinite and like I think about that several times a year and I have for the last 26 years, 27 years. It really stuck with me.
- [30:48]
Jeff O'Neill
I have read this before, but I cannot tell you literally. I have no idea why when I think it was before the movie came out. I would not swear to that. I certainly wasn't reading it in college when it came out. Like, I mean it was a senior. No, I'm sorry. I graduated in 96. I was a junior and a senior of college when the book came out. I guarantee you I wasn't reading it then. My best guess is I maybe read it when the movie was coming out.
- [31:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, that was early Book Riot days.
- [31:14]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Maybe picked it up because it was very much around the same time and it was quite short. I don't have much of a memory of my reaction to it other than I liked it. You know, I like. I thought it was interesting and I got through it quickly and all the things we're going to talk about.
- [31:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think there's a pretty narrow age window where this book can. Can hit you as a direct experience rather than something that you're observing. And once you're in college it's probably too late.
- [31:40]
Jeff O'Neill
It's probably too late because you've already done it. Right. I mean, I guess this is a good segue in what I like to read it all about. It's. I think it's important for the structure and perspective in reading experience to think of Charlie, the main character is a freshman but he gets hooked up with seniors. Right. In a scene that I think in reading is not really clear. And there's a little bit of hand wavy, yada yada. Why these couple of seniors would take their kid, this kid under his wing. But let's just. This, this happens in. It's just a thing they Dazed and Confused. It happens in Almost Famous like this is. But you get access to the kids who are a little more advanced. They've. They've seen a little bit more of life. And he himself is quite isolated because he's the youngest because his brother and sister don't talk to him. His best friend in middle school has died. He. He's a, he's a waif. He's a. He's a naive person who then becomes our observer and our window into this world. And I think that's often we get mostly in coming of age movies and Anthony Michael Hall.
- [32:44]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh yeah.
- [32:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Less of a Judd Nelson. Like that's just how these things work. And, and I think that's interesting. To its younger brother. It's younger siblings. Right. Sometimes middle, never the oldest. Unless it's a different kind of a book of some kind. But we are then in his perspective, not just from being a teenager, but in the social circle of this particular public high school in Pittsburgh. And he falls in with a. I guess at this point, we're no longer a nerd culture, really. The high 80s. This is emojis, goth, art, kids, grunge. Like, that's where this is. And these are the kinds of kids that are thinking about college and they're not caring about football, though they go to the football games. Also a really important sort of liminal moment to there.
- [33:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [33:29]
Jeff O'Neill
So they're insiders and outsiders. I think that's important. Like the complete outsider. We get a couple of characters that are like, maybe beyond the pale of description in this book, which I always find is interesting. Like, the kitty introduced himself, the locker at the end, and he's like, hey, I'm Charles. Like, yeah, I know who you are. It's like, whoa, what's that kid's perspective? Like, they're completely outside of the pale. There's. But they're close. They're not within. But they're close enough where they can move in and out. And that the permeable membrane of the mane of high school life. We feel the puncture going back and forth. Both. Sometimes it's exciting and sometimes very dangerous and sometimes very painful.
- [34:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. That they're not the cool kids, but they're not the furthest outcast. Right. And so that sets up like a pretty classic coming of age story. Like, this is what most YA literature is about. Figuring out who you are and how to exist in the world with other people. And I think anybody who's ever felt like an outsider, which is all of us at some point, and that's the magic of how these books work. Can see themselves in Charlie. You can feel seen by the book. There is just a really powerful. You're not the only one about this book. And Chbosky conveys it without saying it directly, which is, I think, one of the main reasons that this works. There's not an overt. Like, this is not a Trevor project. It gets better video. There is a reason and a use for those, and they are certainly important. But there is something more powerful. We come around to this a lot on this show about showing rather than telling. And Chbosky is showing that. That you can be a lonely kid who's experienced all the things that Charlie has and still find your way through. And I think the book just like in terms of what it feels like, it really nails what it feels like to be experiencing so much of life for the first time. Like there's excitement and anxiety and wonder and confusion and this like overarching feeling that it's all very important. And awareness in the moment that you're having a formative experience or like what the kids today would call the core memories. Like Charlie has awareness at times that he is forming a core memory that this is. This thing that's happening to him right now is something he both wants to be inside of as deeply as possible because it's going to be central to his life and understanding of himself. But also he can't help seeing it from a little distance with that awareness of like this is going to matter to me.
- [35:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Because at this point we have 40 years, maybe a little bit more of youth culture in the bank, sort of going back to Bill Haley and rock around the clock post World War II. And he's consumed Greece probably or at least seen or knows about Greece. He knows about the John Hughes movies. He knows about Rebel Without a Cause, Eve. It's funny, the scene of his own cultural imagining happens around his brother going to college. At one point even says, I hope he's having the kind of college experiences like you see in the movies. Like that's his access to it, right? So he's very at times self aware, but in a way that I don't even understand. Most of us aware about how much of our experience of things were on the press of his experiences are mediated by seeing representations of it in other forms. Whether it's parenthood or death or marriage or vacations or whatever else that might be. There's very few experiences that a lot that most of us have that haven't been grist for the art mill at some point. And then how to see, like, does any of that hold up? Is it bull? Can I take any from that? Is it helpful for me? Is that helpful for me to all. Because he doesn't get. He both does and doesn't get works of art that helps help him, right? He both does and doesn't get friends that help him. He both does and doesn't get family members that help him. It's sort of picking from these little places sort of scrabble up the climbing wall of making it over the top into being an adult. And I think that's the kind of structurally that makes sense because this transitional time, I don't know, there's a way around it. This is one of my straight thoughts. Is there a way to do 15 better? Can someone perfect the way to do 15? And I think you really can't because as you say, you're becoming physically, sexually, intellectually more mature. And it's not a binary switch where you go over the top one day versus the other. Maybe that's an older way of thinking about adulthood or something like this, but it's gradual. It's different for everyone. Your own situation makes a huge difference from it. And you just. There, we talked about this forever. There's just no way of navigating pre. Navigating the awkwardness. There's no real driver's ed for being in relationship to other people romantically, interpersonally or whatever, when they themselves also don't know how to drive. Yeah, there's emotional bumper cars out here. Rebecca Mad Max Fury Road. When it comes to being a person in the world in high school, it is.
- [38:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. There is no cheat code for it. And I think that, like, that's one of the reasons that reading it, it felt like it generally holds up. Like, because that is just so universal. But Chbosky also, I thought really wisely, mostly refrains from giving time anchored references. So, like, we get a few book titles, but they're older books that Charlie's teacher is giving to him. We get a couple song titles, but for the most part, like, we don't have a lot of, like, this is 1991 happening on the page so that you can map on your own teenage moments to it. That is certainly what I did when I read it, you know, eight years later than when the book is set. And it just really generally works like there's some language, some gender dynamic stuff. There's homophobia on the page. That's outdated. But like, boy, were they accurate in 1999. Like, this is a maybe an interesting thing also, if you give it to your kids, is like, no, this really was like how teenagers talked about dating. This was how gender dynamics worked. This was like what the sexual politics were like in, in high schools in the mid-90s. And that's really, really different now.
- [39:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I also want to give oneils warning about epistolary form. Remember, everyone, be careful out there. When you're getting letters or diary entries and feeling like you are closer to the character, you are not. You are farther from the character. And this one, I think is especially seductive because of this. Anonymous. I didn't, I even looked for, like, I don't even think we're supposed to be able to guess or no. Or have any idea who this person. Person is like.
- [39:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
And Chbosky's never given any clues.
- [39:53]
Jeff O'Neill
It's. It's beside the point, though. It's fascinating to think about Charlie himself thinking there's a real person, but that real person, he is masking his own. He's like using the. The letter writing version of one of those things that masks your voice and you sound like Bane or something like that. But even that, because it says he even thinks that a diary can be found. So he's worried about that. So that's part of o' Neill's warnings. Remember, even people writing diaries, they think about. But there is a writer here. And because it's anonymous and because they don't have contact, that's about as close as you can get to feeling like Charlie's giving you the full dope. But even that Chbosky could have chosen an omniscient narrator, a different kind of first person. That distance is interesting because Charlie is narrating, narrativizing and storytelling and mythologizing his own experience as he goes. Right. That's important to think about.
- [40:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it also serves the function of lightening the heavy moments a little bit that, like.
- [40:48]
Jeff O'Neill
Because they've already happened.
- [40:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. And there's a. There's like a two week period where none of his friends will talk to him because he really bones it at a party and like, you know, hasn't been able to tell the girl he's dating that he wants to break up with her. So he takes this moment of truth or dare where his friend dares him to kiss the prettiest girl in the room, and instead of kissing, kissing his girlfriend, he kisses Sam, the girl he's really in love with. And it just like, it ruins everything. Nobody talks to him for two weeks. And if we're in Charlie's head in a first person omniscient narration of that as it's happening, I think it's just harder to sit with and a lot darker. But because he's. He gives us the. Like we're not actually with him in the first two weeks. There's a letter that he writes where it's like, I haven't talked to anybody in two weeks. So he's already started to process it. And that makes sense. It a little more just easier to navigate your way into than sitting with the real, like, immediacy of it or of him, you know, his friends telling him, like, just leave and we'll call you when it's cool to interact again. And that he doesn't know if they're ever going to call. Like I was genuinely so stressed out for poor.
- [41:58]
Jeff O'Neill
It happens pretty quickly. I think the. The. It's a great point. And I think a way sometimes you can a b test the universe. The way things think about if this was written more like the secret history. Because remember those stretch of the secret history. Like are we. Spoiler secret history. Are we going to kill Bunny? Is it gonna. Are they gonna find out what's gonna happen? And that was on for. And it's super stressful. I think that's what Tart was trying to do. She was trying to make a paternal. She's after something a little bit different here where there's not a lot of narrative tension. You're not reading this for the story to figure out what's going to happen. Because it feels like it actually happens in high school. It feels kind of random, right? Like this. This happened and then this happened. Happened. We went to the dance and there was this night or whatever. And so that after the fact narration from his point of view. It's already happened. Feels a little safer. It can move a little bit more quickly. And then Chbosky doesn't have to do weird things about like what is he going to admit to himself? What he isn't like he's very much in his own head. I. I'm going to bring a stray thought up to here because you mentioned that Truth or dare? Has anyone's life ever been made better by a teenage Truth or Dare or Spin the bottle? A no.
- [42:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
We should outlaw both of those.
- [43:00]
Jeff O'Neill
This is advice to all 13 year olds who haven't gotten these situations yet. Realize this is a 0% success rate of working out great for people. Right? This is Russian where there's a bullet in every chamber. Do not do this. And I'm not even saying this because it's bad. Like it's a moral something. I'm looking out for you.
- [43:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [43:20]
Jeff O'Neill
You're not gonna follow the culture. There's never a moment in a book where someone did truth or dare and everyone found out the truth. And there was a bunch of healing and involved. This is not how it works, people.
- [43:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [43:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Did you ever play Spin the Bottle?
- [43:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
I. Yes.
- [43:34]
Jeff O'Neill
Okay, we'll save that for office hours.
- [43:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
- [44:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Yeah, that's.
- [45:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Let's see. Back to the book. Very clipped, non descriptive language. Right? He's not trying to be a fancy smart guy writer and it's very, it's very focused on the events of his life. There's some rare diversions or random thoughts. Thoughts. But unlike say I keep going back to catching the rye and that's because of all the reasons we just we talked about. There's a less sort of thinking about the world if he is thinking about the world through the prism of his friends or sort of the immediate moments here.
- [45:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's so immediate and descriptive rather than analytical or diagnostic. Which I really appreciated, especially in Charlie talking about his experience of mental health problems. Like just the way the fact that he talks about them normalizes it. And Chbosky must have been intentional about trying to destigmatize these things. But it never like therapy. Language is not a thing yet in the culture and the book never approaches anything like that. That Charlie talks about what it feels like to be in his head. He talks about the feeling that he can't stop thinking or that he's going to the dark place. But we get to know what that experience is like rather than his intellectualized version of it. And I think that sense makes it very relatable as a teenager too because like who among us has not had at least a moment of feeling like oh my God, if I could just unplug my brain.
- [46:22]
Jeff O'Neill
Chbosky was very intentional and this I did read an interview about writing A gay character who certainly struggled and that was a part of their story. But also super like the funniest, most confident person in the book, I think is Patrick. And otherwise a super round character. So that was very much at play. And it got me thinking about, I think the signal coming of age, popular artistic work is my soul called Life from this era. This is a one season, 1994. And there's a character and then that is. It's a very similar dynamic along the ways.
- [46:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh yeah, that's right.
- [46:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Claire Danes, Ricky. I kept. I think I haven't seen in a million years. It was only one season, whatever. But I kept thinking about my so Called Life over also an MTV proper.
- [47:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [47:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Fascinating to think about.
- [47:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
I watched it a couple years ago because it is just like a handful of episodes and it still really hits.
- [47:12]
Jeff O'Neill
It does. That's so fascinating. A famous kind of like it was the Freaks and Geeks of the early 90s. And the freaks and Geeks was the Freaks and Geeks of, I guess, the late 90s.
- [47:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it was like, it was so frank about everything. Like, my parents let me read whatever I wanted, but I was not supposed to watch My so Called Life. I was, I think, a little younger than the characters. And I remember like, like sneaking it when they weren't around or like watching at a friend's house and being like, oh my God, they just get me.
- [47:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Jordan Catalano. Important for a lot of people there.
- [47:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [47:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's move into Strange Thoughts. I think this is probably our longest stray thoughts collection here because we. We know of what we speak when it comes to this. This era.
- [47:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
So just. Yeah, really so many. But I really wondered, seeing the kitchen sink of it all, if in these, like pre 2000s, whether young adult authors really felt like they had to like shoot their one shot and throw everything into a single book in case they didn't get another crack. Because it really is astonishing how many of the big issues are present here. And its similarity to how Packed Forever is made me wonder, like, is that what was going on before we had a really robust young adult literature?
- [48:24]
Jeff O'Neill
That's interesting. What else you got?
- [48:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Mr. Keating effect is so real. Like, Charlie's teacher is his name Henry? Bill. Bill is like, he's in Teach for America. So he's basically fresh out of college.
- [48:38]
Jeff O'Neill
And he's 24, maybe.
- [48:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, 24, 25. And he's giving Charlie extra books to read because he sees something in him. Like they're just a couple notches shy of oh, Captain, my Captain. But I Spent a lot of time thinking about how it's so common in these stories for it to be the English teacher. It's not just that. It's a teacher who sees something in you and takes you under their wing. And probably some of this has to do with like writers had this experience with English teachers. But this like sort of magical English teacher effect that is really brought to life in Dead Poets Society is really, really present here that Charlie starts to understand some things about himself and the world through these books. And he feels then that this teacher gets him too. And just that idea that somebody gets you and that these feelings of not being gotten can lead to your own artistic work. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho. Look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you. And hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling. Ross. Work your magic is, I think, really powerful.
- [49:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's see. I will. This was one of mine. I'm sorry, I'll dovetail on your. Is Charlie smart? So we're told at the end. Bill says, I don't know Charlie. I don't know how smart you are. You are so not only of my students, but. And again, these are capably written letters. But did you. Did you read this? Thinking we've got. We've got a real one on our hands with Charlie.
- [50:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
He's so innocent that it's really hard to tell.
- [50:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I. I didn't buy. I buy a teacher taking interested kid who likes to read news at 11. But that note of like not only did. Did I think you would like this, it was interesting for you, but you were like sort of singular. That was a bridge too far for me. It would have been fine if it's just like I saw you like this. I saw you're getting something out of it. I'm so glad. I wish you the best. I think you've got a lot of pitch. That's enough. That's all we have to do. Let's be careful.
- [50:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
A second part of that conversation that's important that though, because Bill does say to him, and I'm saying this to you because I'm not sure that anyone else ever has.
- [50:47]
Jeff O'Neill
And you know why? Because he's not smart. No one else has ever said it. Because he's not that smart. Rebecca. He's fine.
- [50:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that maybe he is laying it on a little thick because Charlie needs. Charlie needs to be hyped up. He needs to be glazed.
- [51:02]
Jeff O'Neill
I. I think that the part that was in it for me is that he gets an alternative idea of a life. Right. He's. Bill has this girlfriend, they're artistic, they're living together, they're. There's something on the other side of what he's seen. And because I think that's something that doesn't get represented very well. Like we got a lot of my so called life in the real worlds and stuff. But we didn't get. You're 26 and things are going okay and you're not just the man in the gray flannel suit or you're not taking mother's little helpers or you're, you're not like, how do you help someone imagine the possibility without them? Because this is something I've talked about with my own kids is like I didn't really know what was possible out there to be an adult. I didn't know that being a professor was possible. Turns out it wasn't for some of us. But like that was a thing that you, you could pursue. Or like this kind, like, you know, you see what you see and you're innocent. You don't know what you don't know. I think that's maybe the critical thing that teenagers don't get. They're more expert in their domain than I am about high school at this point. But what they don't know is what they don't know and how short this actually is. Right?
- [52:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [52:03]
Jeff O'Neill
And what can come next. And there's ways of being happy and being different in the world that you haven't seen represented on screen. A, because you don't care about adult fiction or whatever at this point. And B, it's unwritten because the future is yet to unfold. And so I think that that's the part I really liked is he got to see. And I, and I'll say this, this is maybe too much tmi. I found out this is something my students really like to see about me when I was a college teacher. Like they were super interested in my life and my relationship with Michelle and why start having kid. And I wasn't like, you know, I, I was just. I'm not saying I was like life goals or anything like that, but that that was a possible outcome was super interesting to them because they just never seen it before.
- [52:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. It's like when your therapist tells you something about themselves.
- [52:46]
Jeff O'Neill
You know. Yes.
- [52:47]
Rebecca Schinsky
And you're like, oh, a window into the life of this person that has a role of authority in my life and they seem like they've got it together. I I love that note, and I really love how well Chbosky captures. And I think it's just a byproduct of the time, but how well he captures how unsurveilled and unsupervised we were. Then, like, Charlie leaves school at what, like 3pm and for several days doesn't go home until late in the evening because he's trying to avoid his girlfriend calling on the phone, and nobody knows where he is in that time. And no one is worried because everybody's just. Just out and about. Like, there's no Find My Friends. There's no what is it life 360. Like, whatever the other apps are that parents use to know where their kids are or that kids are using to know where each other are. Like, they're just out there. And it. Like, that level of unsupervisedness allowed teenagers space to explore themselves and to explore the things they were going to run into in adult life. And, like, some of those things are dangerous or can be. You know, like sex and drugs and drinking can all be dangerous, but they're also all things that we all have to learn to navigate. And they learn them in this peer group with other people who are bumping, like, emotional bumper cars, as you were saying. Like, they're all making these mistakes and conducting these experiments at the same time. And I really felt some longing and some nostalgia for that.
- [54:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, that's. That. That's. That's really interesting. I love this idea of how many infinite tattoos are out there.
- [54:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
There have to be a ton of people with tattoos that say infinite from this. Like, there are a billion playlists on Spotify with I feel infinite. We feel infinite in that moment. I felt infinite. Like, I went and looked and I. I scrolled until I got bored. And then there were still more.
- [54:41]
Jeff O'Neill
The let's have it, let's have it out Joe award. You. You're sort of proposing this for moments of emotional candor that clears the air and allows the community. Were you thinking, when. What moment is that for you?
- [54:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it's the moment. Well, we needed a let's have it out Joe moment instead of the moment where Charlie kisses Sam, but there is a good moment with him and Sam later where she's like, this is. You gotta handle stuff. You gotta show up in your life. You can't just keep prioritizing everybody else. And since we identified this when we talked about Little Women earlier this year, I've been seeing it in other books. Like, these moments where characters just sort of are fed up with each other and are like, fuck it, we have to say it. Let's just say the thing. Let's do it. Let's. So like that's my. Let's have it out Joe award. Here goes, I guess to Sam for telling Charlie how it really is.
- [55:34]
Jeff O'Neill
I think that's, I think that's good. I think that's. It's fascinating because it also could have been that moment where he does kiss Sam rather than what's her name name again. Bad move. You don't like the stage putting people on front Street. Like, that's a real tough thing to do to someone. But he is trying to be honest. Like because he feels that the dam must be broken in some way. Let's do that in private.
- [55:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's the coward's way out.
- [55:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, yeah. Or is it's dumb and reckless cowardly. I'm not sure about this. My note here is, did John Gray take Chbosky's career to get Marty corrected by John Green? I don't think Chbosky had a second YA novel in him. I didn't see anything related that he was a movie person. This was his entree to be like a screenwriter, a staff writer. Like this was his book that got him into the next level.
- [56:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
I wonder, I guess related to this, like if Perks of Being a Wallflower got cited in the comp titles when John Green's agent was shopping. His debut has to have been Is there. Right. Is there a like, look, we have a demonstrated market for these kinds of stories, especially about young teenage boys. Let's. Let's get in there.
- [56:39]
Jeff O'Neill
One of the most cited phrases is we accept the love we deserve. We think we deserve. That means what exactly to me, Rebecca, is this garbage?
- [56:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, I have this in notable quotes because I genuinely thought this was an Oprah Dr. Phil thing. Like, I'm pretty sure that's where I first encountered this idea. But it's the. It's kind of a like unintentionally victim blamy situation of like you're in a. You're in a shitty relationship and it, you're tolerating being treated badly because low self esteem is like. Is the theory like you're letting people treat you badly because you don't think you deserve any better. And I think there's a nugget of unconscious truth to that. But it is not the whole story in bad relationships. Or certainly it's not the story and abusive ones. But. But it's, it's one of those things that also sounds like Dorm room wisdom.
- [57:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I, I, I was like, I, I'm rejecting that. I mean, there's maybe something there, but it feels so tried and self involved
- [57:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
that I like really, really thought it was Oprah.
- [57:42]
Jeff O'Neill
I was conflicted about the letters to this the anonymous person. I think it's interesting from a structural point of view, lets the writer, lets Chbosky himself do interesting things, but also like, would anyone in a million years do this? I just, I, I just. He does not pass the smell test to me.
- [58:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
It had been so long since I read it that about halfway through I paused and had a moment of like, is he actually writing these to someone or is this all just a construction? And like two pages after, I wondered that Charlie talked about getting a stamp and walking the letter down to the mailbox and I was like, oh, I guess he's actually doing it.
- [58:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I think you could have the same book just without the Dear Whatever and Love Charlie and Get rid of. You can have the same book and it's all narrated in the same person and the same simple past. And readers are. We don't ask that we know where these sort of consciousnesses are coming from. We understand books. That's my note. We understand how books work.
- [58:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's not the best, but it's also not the worst because the worst word goes to it ends with us. And the diary written as letters to Ellen DeGeneres.
- [58:50]
Jeff O'Neill
That is a true disaster.
- [58:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
Unforgivable.
- [58:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Never think about my next is what do we think of his mixtape?
- [58:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Depressing. The mixtape is depressing. This is not how you, I mean, I don't know. This might have worked on somebody in 1991, but opening with the Smiths and then going to Simon and Garfunkel and then A Whiter Shade of Pale, then some Nick Drake, Moody Blues, Smashing Pumpkins, Blackbird by the Beatles and Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. Like, this is an existential crisis.
- [59:22]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, this is not a real drip. I made mixtapes around this time and I've got notes on the mixtape. A couple of these are one, the 70s nostalgia in the 90s was real, but this is too much. Yeah, there would absolutely been Led Zeppelin on this. I think the thing it's absolutely missing. And I think there's something Chbosky's not calibrated correctly because he's too old is there would have been hip hop on this. There absolutely would have been hip hop on this in some way by 1991. It could have been Sugar Hill Gang, it could have been Beastie Boys, it could have been Whatever. But there would have been hip hop of some kind on this.
- [59:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
And this is just not a let me make you fall in love with me kind of mixtape.
- [59:58]
Jeff O'Neill
It's just not fun.
- [59:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's not.
- [60:00]
Jeff O'Neill
There's asleep by the Smith's on there twice.
- [60:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Black eyeliner. This is a black eyeliner mixtape.
- [60:07]
Jeff O'Neill
This goes into my. When did the high school experience become a thing again? I've got the earliest nostalgia core one was American Graffiti, which actually is great. I love this movie. I think it holds holds up terrifically. Some combination of car culture, popular merging in high school is a prelude to college like that becoming more of a pipeline after the GI Bill. And I think we're still living in car culture, meaning freedom and a defined teen culture. I think that's a lot happening on phones but happens otherware popular music and then high school as a prelude to other things. And again, look at our reading list. Even in this, the pre lapserian one is sort of go tell it on the mountain and little women and think of the coming of age of little. It's all over the place in there. There is no public high school. Like it is a mess. Like I'm now going to be a governess. I'm getting married. I'm not going like, you were just out there. You were just out there, man. There wasn't this even interstitial period where you have a chance to figure it out.
- [61:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And their social lives are so constrained and directed and defined that this is like, this is pretty new. And then it turned out to be a pretty, pretty actually temporary experience of adolescence. That's not how teenagers are experiencing it for the most part today. This sort of really unsurveilled freedom. Like yeah, you know, I. I mean I had this at the time that I read this book. My parents both worked. I got home from school like three or four. There were a couple of hours where nobody was in my house. You could go to a friend's house that their parents might not be home for another several hours. Like we threw the parties. They did not look like the parties and can't hardly wait but like we threw the parties. We did the things. They're like, you would leave the house and your parents would not know for sure what you were doing.
- [61:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Yep, I do like that Charlie has moments of getting out of his own head and imagining the lives and futures and inner working of others. That's a little unusual for a kid. And if I'm going to give him some props for maybe being manic pixie dream boy or whatever Bill thinks he is at the end.
- [62:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's fair.
- [62:03]
Jeff O'Neill
Like, so I'll just read a little bit this. I think this is a quote. I think about all this sometimes when I'm watching a football game with Patrick and Sam. I look at the field and I think about the boy who just made the touchdown. I think that these are the glory days for that boy. And this moment will just be another story someday because all the people who make touchdowns and home runs will be somebody's dad. And when his children look back at his yearbook photograph, they will think that their dad was rugged and handsome and looked a lot happier than they are. I just hope I remember to tell my kids, kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope they believe me. I think that was my favorite bit of the whole book.
- [62:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, There's a bit, I think, right after that where he says, maybe these are my glory days. And I just don't know it because they don't involve a ball. Something like that, and really nails it. He also has a moment like that where when he's starting to feel depressed, he's, like, watching all of his friends experiencing something together and he feels on the outside of it, but he recognizes that if he weren't. Weren't depressed, it's the kind of moment that would feel good. It would feel like unity. And it's just this mental health moment that is skewing his perception of what's happening there.
- [63:09]
Jeff O'Neill
My last straight thought, and this is really existential and personally meaningful, is, is there a way to do adolescence that doesn't make people identify with books like this?
- [63:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't know. I just think adolescence is hard and
- [63:20]
Jeff O'Neill
weird and it's like the best version of Arukana now. Like, is there what, you know, like, not going to be. You're still pulling the nerve out of your head. But maybe it doesn't have to be as bad. I think it's the loneliness I think about. Is there a way to make. And maybe that's what art is. And therapy speak and counselor and, you know, trying to be aware and present is like. It can feel very lonely. And it is lonely because you're only going through it in your own particular way. And Charlie, at his best moments sees himself as part of a process, Right? It's seeing a sort of like a larger ecosystem of life. And this is just a stage in it, but that just is doing a lot of stage, a lot of work in that sentence when you're 15 and a half, right? It doesn't feel that way. And I don't know. It's possible not to feel that way.
- [64:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, it feels like you're gonna feel that way forever. And he does get those little glimpses that there is another side to it. As Sam and Patrick graduate, as his brother comes home from college and tells him what it's like, as his sister gets ready to go to college, he can start. He's starting to see the possibilities and that. And maybe he's not going to feel this way forever.
- [64:25]
Jeff O'Neill
And then my. My sub one. Was this a good experience? Apart from the traumatic stuff like his, you know, aunt Helen and then, you know, his. His friend in middle school killing themselves, apart from the actual bad stuff? Is this good? Is this a good experience? And that's a question I have about my own high school experience. And maybe we'll get into that a little bit more in the opposite hours at the same time.
- [64:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's a real question.
- [64:44]
Jeff O'Neill
Notable quotes lead us off.
- [64:45]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, well, goodreads. Favorite is that one about we accept the love we think we deserve. So stay real. Goodreads.
- [64:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I. I reject that. We're gonna. We're gonna pop that one off. That's our first pancake here.
- [64:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [64:57]
Jeff O'Neill
I swear we were infinite. I know you like this. I like it too. Ish.
- [65:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
This is just the. I don't even know if I like this so much as when I read this in 1999 and I was, you know, driving my first car with my friends on Friday nights down and like semi charmed life blasting some third eyed blind. I felt.
- [65:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Giving you existential freedom, right? Yeah.
- [65:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And in fact, like a year ago, that came on when Bob and I were driving home from dinner one night on like a warm spring night. The windows were down and the sunroof was open, and they're like, da da da da da da da da started playing and I was like, oh my God. And we just. We just drove and sang and I was like, this is. As the music went down. It was like that was a perks of being a wallflower mom moment. Like that. In that moment, I swear we were infinite is not how I would have labeled it as a teenager, but I knew exactly what he meant when I read that when I was 17.
- [65:55]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, what does he mean?
- [65:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's. I think it just feels like you're connected to something bigger.
- [66:01]
Jeff O'Neill
It's transcendent, free and connected at the same time. Like, I don't know that there's. There's a paradoxical feeling of that. I was It's Rona. Go ahead, finish that.
- [66:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, it's just. It's just that transcendence. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
- [66:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Rowan and I were driving around. Sunny day, beautiful, like bluebird weather. 70 degrees sunny. We're driving around. We like to listen to music all the time, but especially Rowan and I, when we're just the two of us driving, roll the windows down and we play music loud and we, you know, take. That's what's different now is you can take requests. I plug in Spotify, and we have the entire catalog of human musical output in there. And I was. We were talking about our favorite Sunny Day songs. Like, you know, there's a couple songs that if I play them on a day like this, this. I'm like wild stallions being transported back in time. And I don't feel. I feel. I know that time has changed, but something unlocks, is unleashed. I get connected to driving my 1982 Gold Honda Civic around, you know, in the summertime in Kansas with the windows down, on the way to play basketball or softball or whatever I was doing. And you do feel like you're part of something bigger. And it's. You get sort of Whitman. Time avails not. Space avails not like all of a sudden, for a moment.
- [67:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's just one of those magical things that music can do.
- [67:16]
Jeff O'Neill
Music can smell.
- [67:17]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Music and smell. That music can really do it. And that you can. Once you make that memory, you can go back and unlock it, you know, like. Like you're saying we can be here 30 years later, driving around and still having those moments. Moments. I love how central music is to these friends lives. Like, there's a. One of my favorite lines is Sam saying, patrick used to be popular, or Charlie says, Patrick used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music. Like, that's. That's real. You hear. You start to hear something a little more complicated and a little more interesting, and you get a little more interesting. And they just. They spend all this unstructured time to get through, like, just hanging out. And I do think that, like, kids today have lost access to just the art of the hang. The teenagers in my life talk about, like, the difficulty of just hanging out with friends and everybody not just being in their phones.
- [68:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh, my God, yes.
- [68:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
You know, like, I spent so much time just, like, sitting on couches in people's basements, and they're doing the same thing in the book. And Charlie says, I don't know what it was, and I know we really didn't accomplish anything. Thing but it felt great to sit there and talk about our place in things. And you're just. You're like, starting to unlock really what connection can be really what those conversations about the big things in life and the most sensitive things about your own experience can be, like with people who are there with you and want to listen to you. And it's. I mean, I thought Chbosky just really captured that beautifully.
- [68:50]
Jeff O'Neill
I'll go down to a couple. Let's see. I finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time. But then again, I always think that until I read another book. So that's. That's real. Especially when you're a bookish teenager where you may have literally 36 books you've read on your own that you haven't read for class.
- [69:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right?
- [69:08]
Jeff O'Neill
And it's fun to have teenagers in my house and really to just have kids, because any movie or book they read literally could now be their favorite book of all time. Just because the day there's not that much data, you know, there's a 3% chance that one of the 33 movies you've seen is your favorite movie of all time. Time. And even then, when you see later him recommend his books for his friends, they're just every book he's read because he got handed down to them. Like, they just don't have data here. They just. They're still wiring data to make sense of themselves in their world and the date they over index on the data they do have because that's all the data they have, whether or not it's To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, a stray thought from before. Naked Lunch is some crazy work for Bill to recommend. Go Google yourself. Naked Lunch. I forgot about that.
- [69:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Isn't that the one that Bill recommends when, like, he's having an off day because he and his girlfriend were fighting?
- [69:55]
Jeff O'Neill
I tried to read. I've read Naked Lunch. And I did it sort of as I was making my way through lists of books. And I know this is a thing, and that's. That was. I consider myself an intelligent person. Not as smart as Charlie, obviously not Charlie, But I was like, what in the living hell is going against that? This is Patrick, and I'm not sure I know what to make of this. So I present it to you, Rebecca. Do you ever think, Charlie, that our group is the same as any other group, like the football team, and that the only real difference between us is what we wear and why we wear it? Yeah. And then there was a pause. Well, I think it's all bullshit. And I'm not sure what he means by that. Like, what's that There is a difference or there is isn't a difference. Does he think the difference. Does he think the idea that they're different is. Or the idea that they're not different is bullshit?
- [70:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think Patrick would say that. My reading of it is that he thinks the idea that they are different is bullshit. Like, because Patrick's in love with a football player who is closeted and he is. Patrick, like, very clearly sort of exists outside of the social group boundaries. Like, he's in the theater kid gang who's performing the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But also he's an avid football fan. He goes to the. To the games and he sort of has found his people that he feels comfortable with. But I think he's one of those kids who sees like, the social demarcations and the popular kids. And he knows that that's all a facade. Like, he knows that the popular kids are not actually happier than anybody else.
- [71:29]
Jeff O'Neill
I guess maybe I have more modern language for. I think it's constructed but real, that difference. And that was my own experience of this through my life. And maybe that.
- [71:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [71:39]
Jeff O'Neill
I also like this little observation that feels a little bit more grown up. He was at Bill's house visiting them, and he says, well, then after a few minutes, it was time to leave. I don't know who decides these things. It just happens. And that's right. Like suddenly.
- [71:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
And that's because they don't live in the Midwest. So nobody slapped their thighs and went,
- [71:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Well.
- [72:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
All right.
- [72:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Anything else you want to do for.
- [72:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think I hit all my notable
- [72:07]
Jeff O'Neill
quotes for you, Rebecca.
- [72:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think if you're talking from 2026.
- [72:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [72:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
If you're looking for a time capsule or like a Polaroid of what it felt like to be a teenager, especially in the last days before the Internet. This book will get you that there. Yep.
- [72:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Maybe not trigger warnings. There's sexual assault there. There's. There's a bunch of trigger warnings. Honestly, in here, this is not. What's the highest art coming of age story. Oh, do we know the answer to this question? This just. This question just occurred to me. I'm. I'm not prepped and so I apologize.
- [72:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
I am unprepared to answer this. Send us your emails. Zero to well read book riot dot com.
- [72:49]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, tough. Romeo and Juliet. I don't know.
- [72:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
It doesn't need to be high art, but like, if you're coming. Yeah. If you're coming from an Adult perspective. And you want like a high art experience. It's just this is not a book that you're in for the writing like
- [73:04]
Jeff O'Neill
it's ya because like as we know, and I've been told a million times because I've got an unpopular take about the house on Cerulean Sea on the book ride pod, which is fine. I don't care. I stand by it. We can have different ideas that a young adult, capital Y, capital A is a teen protagonist. Written from their point of view, they're the main character largely dealing with teen issues. But we can write about teenagers doing things from an adult point of view or you know, that's larger other kinds of ways of thinking about these things. It's not written for a 15 year old to see the themselves.
- [73:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [73:40]
Jeff O'Neill
It's written for some other version. So maybe that's a shoot us email zero to well read book riot.com Immortal questions are asked. Which of these are primary? Here, here's our contenders. What is the good life? What do I, my. What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no, largely, what
- [74:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
is the good life? Charlie navigating what he wants from his life, how to make friends. Woven through that is some what do I owe my neighbor? How do you exist in community? There's also some how to deal with the certainty of death because his aunt Helen has died. That was traumatic for him.
- [74:22]
Jeff O'Neill
Right.
- [74:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
And there's a little what's the deal with. Maybe not what's the deal with good and evil, but what's the deal with people who do bad things? Because his aunt Helen, we found out at the very end, sexually molested him when he was a kid. And it's, it's pretty subtle. Like this was one of my stray thoughts is would you get away with that subtle of a reveal of something like that today? And I'm, I'm of two minds about how subtle it is.
- [74:45]
Jeff O'Neill
But yeah, I'm not sure that's a really good question, Rebecca. I don't, I don't know that you would. I think that's where it maybe verges into adult fiction.
- [74:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. You have to be able to like something else. Yeah. You have to be able to paint, pick up the thread that that's what he's talking about. But he's realized he has real empathy for her and some real like understanding that she was the way she was. Because she was abused by men in her life and that what she did was bad and she was responsible for it, but that she was not necessarily a bad person. So he's sort of tangling with. With all of those things. It's not. We're not ringing all of the big life question bells here, but you get a. You get a good handful of them.
- [75:25]
Jeff O'Neill
I think one question that maybe it's actually a lot. It has to do with a lot more art than it's not here. And because of who I am, it will not ascend to the pantheon question. But, like, what to do with boners is also very much a question. Fellow young lady and all. All kinds of a soul boner or, you know, whatever you want it. But, like, that's a stand in for sexuality, romance, like, love, the whole thing.
- [75:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah, you weren't ready for that. That's really interesting. If we map that immortal question back onto all the other books, it's a
- [75:56]
Jeff O'Neill
lot more than you would think. It's a sub question of what is the good life?
- [75:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
I guess, what's Hamlet doing with boners? Jeff, are we sure that this book is not about art and writing at 100%, absolutely. Yeah.
- [76:10]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, writing. I mean, we didn't really talk Charlie, he was writing. What is Charlie getting out of the. He getting something out of. Like, it's there about therapeutic. Right. Like, we know journaling and diaries are therapeutic. And he feels it. He even says it, I think over the course of the book. Right. Like, I feel I feel better because I do this.
- [76:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. It helps him process. Like, it's about what writing does for the writer. But then he's also on the receiving end of writing with all of these books that change his life.
- [76:33]
Jeff O'Neill
So since I'm in the middle of my first time through the Sopranos, I'm seeing everything. The Sopranos lens, the therapy frame of that would have been in the water in nature, 1999.
- [76:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Totally.
- [76:44]
Jeff O'Neill
This idea of, like, talking to this, even this anonymous third person is a useful narrative construction.
- [76:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
And like, also in the water at this time is a lot of angst about the psychology of teenage girls. Reviving Ophelia is out right now.
- [76:58]
Jeff O'Neill
That's right.
- [76:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Eating disorders are having a big cultural moment in the mid to late 90s. Oprah is talking about all of this stuff. So it's interesting and I think special in this moment in YA that Chbosky's writing about a boy boy who's experiencing these things because we were like, the moms were all talking about. Were the girls gonna be mentally healthy and safe in the late 90s, but I don't think we were having that conversation about boys.
- [77:27]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, let's see. Oh, could you get the most of the justice from watching the Signal adaptation, Rebecca?
- [77:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
I just watched it for the first time. I think technically, yes, but. But like the real magic is in Charlie's voice and the letters. And I think you can only get the full impact of it from reading the book.
- [77:46]
Jeff O'Neill
I am going to say this is one of the rare ones where I think the movie can stand in pretty damn well. I think the thing that my memory that jumped out, I did not rewatch this. I know Ezra Miller is now a super fraught person to say the least.
- [77:58]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't know anything about him. I'll google that later.
- [78:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Later. But he is unbelievable. I think he steals the movie ste the movie. He's unbelievable.
- [78:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
He was so compelling. And I did think that watching it like especially the moments where he's performing as Frank Inferter in the Rocky Horror Picture show, like being sort of life of the party really brings to life the Patrick character in a way that Patrick in the movie is better than Patrick in the book for sure.
- [78:24]
Jeff O'Neill
Movie, musical, TV series or Muppets.
- [78:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, I have a policy that I want to put forward about this right now and I don't want any new adaptations of Perks of Being a Wallflower unless everybody promises not to fill it with therapy speak. Like this works.
- [78:40]
Jeff O'Neill
They didn't have the tools then. They don't get the tools now in an adaptation of it.
- [78:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
But I would take it as a jukebox musical. That's like if you wanted to gear it to my generation. You could do Original Recipe, Millennial with like Dashboard Confessional, Third Eye Blind, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette. I'm in charge here, so. Also Counting Crows. But you could do one for like every. Every. Do the Gen Z version, do the Gen Alpha version with their music and just port the story around. I think that would work.
- [79:08]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. There wasn't one grunge. I mean I know 91 was. That was both 10. No, 10 was 92. But Nirvana is talked about in the book and it didn't make the mixtape. That's my biggest beef and I will not accept that that's not a problem for this particular. I do not need another adaptation. I think the one that we're there is quite good. Quite good Trivia, adaptations, rumors, mystery to quotes and more. Rebecca. I'll guess I'll start. Start. Emma Watson is the reason this film got made. This was her first movie after Harry Potter. Chbosky said this in an interview. She loved it. She wanted to play this. And then the funding and everything else came around it. He got to write and then not just write the screenplay, but direct the damn thing. Because Emma Watts, like, she had that much pull at this particular moment. Hard to remember how big of a deal it was. She's still a huge star though. I think she's more famous for being Emma Watson now than for being an actress, which again, nice work if you can get it, but Emma Watson wanting to play Sam and do that part is the reason this movie.
- [80:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, as I said, there's tons of playlists on Spotify with I Feel Infinite or some variation. I got curious about other titles from MTV Books when I was looking for trivia about this book. There are some real gems. None of them have done well.
- [80:20]
Jeff O'Neill
I can't believe these are real.
- [80:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
I know. There's a series called Bard Academy and the entries all have plays on literary names like Wuthering High, the Scarlet Letterman and my favorite, Moby Click.
- [80:35]
Jeff O'Neill
You can't. You know what my hot take is? MTV Books deserve to go out of business.
- [80:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. There's also one called oh My Goth by Gina Showalter that was allegedly so bad that the author yanked it from publication and rewrote it. And MTV Books, yeah. MTV Books did not stick around for long after this book comes out, but they relaunched in 2023. Whale fall by Daniel Krause. Big book. I know you were a fan, like was on the New York Times.
- [81:03]
Jeff O'Neill
That is a weird. It's going to be made into a movie. This is a weird. What? That is such a weird thing for them to do.
- [81:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Daniel Krause, like is the highest profile author that MTV Books has had since the relaunch. But the relaunch also does not seem to be going great. Like the MTV Books Instagram account has not posted since December of 2025 and I couldn't find any like updates about other new books coming. So I. I think that MTV Books is maybe just, you know, not meant to be.
- [81:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Tough, tough, tough, hot takes. Would you like to begin or would you like to begin?
- [81:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean we talked about it already that there's really like, I just did not buy it that a 15 year old boy who had a big brother and attended public schools in night 1991 didn't know what masturbation was. I did not believe it.
- [81:46]
Jeff O'Neill
That he didn't know that the word. There was a word for it.
- [81:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
No, I think he doesn't know what it is and he like, he, he like discovers it and then is right.
- [81:55]
Jeff O'Neill
We had sex ed in middle school in Kansas.
- [81:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [82:01]
Jeff O'Neill
That might be one where maybe Chbosky being just eight years older, I wonder that I bumped up against that too. It's like, what are we doing here?
- [82:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
I didn't believe it at all. There's this moment where Sam kisses Charlie because she wants his first kiss to come from someone who loves him.
- [82:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Very tough stuff.
- [82:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I think, like, maybe my hotter take, I think that's really selfish. Like in the book, it comes off as kind of sweet. In the movie, you're like, oh, this is so mean to him. Like, she thinks that she's doing him a favor, but he gets to kiss the person that he's been fantasizing about and knows that it's not real. Just this is not the heroic feat that Sam and the chabot.
- [82:40]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't remember. Do they do this scene in the movie where they're like, they are performing in Rocky Horror where they're like rubbing again. They do that in the movie.
- [82:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [82:49]
Jeff O'Neill
Also very. That's. That very much goes into what do I do with this boner question. That's a very tough, tough spot for Charlie. Yeah.
- [82:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I also think if you're over 21, you're probably too old to read this.
- [82:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. My related one is this is both the best argument, argument for and the worst argument against stories about 15 year olds that are for 15 year olds. Like, yeah, it is, but it's also by its nature limited in important ways. But I don't have a better way. I mean, I don't present to know a better, different way. But like, I could feel myself bumping up against the. And then what? But yes, you're almost there. You're almost getting it. But like, you're also 15 and that's okay. All teen rebel stories of drinking and angst and whatever they have now have blurred into me into a slurry of yes, and it's real and I get it, but it's not for me. Me. Every generation needs one to reflect their particularities, but that is all surface clutter. I get it. I think, okay, I've got a handle on the coming of age story. There are different ones and they're different. Like, we're going to do some recs and read alongs. I'm going to go off book a little bit. I think it's more interesting to see different cultures. But I think I'm good on white straight kids who like Art in public high schools. I think I'm covered.
- [83:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. I think we've trod that ground.
- [83:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes. I think I'm covered. Yeah.
- [83:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
All right, let's do read alikes then.
- [84:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [84:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
My first one is not a novel at all. It's a memoir, Stay True by Hwa Su, which came out a couple of years ago. And I remember when I read it, it's a memoir about a friendship that he forms in his freshman year of college. So he's a little older than these characters, but sue goes off to college, doesn't really know anybody. He is a kind of a Charlie character. He's a quiet, artsy kid. He's been through some stuff and he befriends this frat guy and they form a really deep friendship that is like, surprising to both of them about who the other person is under the surface. And this is a memoir about this life changing, early adulthood friendship. There is a scene where they are driving around in a car listening to music. And I remember when I read the book being like, oh, they're having a perks of being a Wallflower moment. Just an amazing, beautiful memoir. We talk on the br pod about like, never pass up a memoir by a New Yorker writer. And Stay True is one of the best and was nominated for a bunch of awards the year that it came out. I think also spiritually, Kurt Vonnegut's collected commencement speeches with advice to young people is a fun place to go. That collection is called if this isn't Nice, what Is. And it comes from Vonnegut exhorting people like to paraphrase it. I like, I urge you when you are having a moment that is wonderful to pause and notice that you're in that moment.
- [85:24]
Jeff O'Neill
What is.
- [85:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. And Charlie is discovering the magic of that of being in like present and in the middle of something wonderful. Catcher in the Rye, an obvious read alike and an inspiration.
- [85:34]
Jeff O'Neill
What's your, what's your sense memory of Catcher in the Rye right now? Rebecca Schinsky? Are you like, I remember liking Catcher in the Rye if we were to it tomorrow or like, because people may not know, but it's now seen as what, like dated. And it's like, I think if it's on the red flag on your dating profile, like, I'm not sure where we.
- [85:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think we need a redemption tour for Catcher in the Rye and we'll, we will give it one when we do it here on zero to well read because it's. This is a book about what it is to feel like to be a Teenager. And it captures that well. I remember loving all the stuff about phoning and like really liking Holden Caulfield's voice. I got to read it as a teenager before there was this sort of cultural aura of like, you know, before we had come all the way around on it. I do think if you're like a 35 year old man and Catcher in the Rye is still the book you relate the most to, like I think
- [86:27]
Jeff O'Neill
that's a wonderful point. I think that's fair. That's been entered and accepted into the record.
- [86:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes, right. That's the red flag. But if you're 15 and reading Holden Caulfield, being disillusioned with the, especially the adults around him and all the kids who are kind of fake posers, like that's a persistent and prevalent feeling. I think Catcher in the Rye works.
- [86:47]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, maybe I'll read. I haven't read it in 20 years, so I could be wrong in my current lens. But my memory of my own reading experience when I was in my 20s, I think maybe, maybe in late teens was pretty interesting.
- [87:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, you didn't have to read it in school.
- [87:03]
Jeff O'Neill
I don't think so. Again, I'm, I'm, I'm fishing here for those particular things that are foundational. I have the larger John Green corpus. You have specifically looking for Alaska here it looks like.
- [87:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Which I've not read. But the Internet recommends Looking for Alaska.
- [87:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Did you read Looking? No, sorry.
- [87:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Fault in our Stars.
- [87:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes. Did you read that?
- [87:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes, I did.
- [87:23]
Jeff O'Neill
So the knock on the Greeniverse and a lot of ya frankly that has like really hyper literate, super smart adult written dialogue in teenagers mouths. That's the converse of. Charlie isn't smart. It's like, oh, those kids are too smart. I don't know what I want. Maybe it's unfair to put it that way.
- [87:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's a real Goldilocks situation.
- [87:41]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I've got a couple recommendations that aren't for exactly like this thing, but this movie came out seven, eight years ago. Edge of Seventeen starring Haley Stanfield.
- [87:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [87:50]
Jeff O'Neill
And Woody Harrelson is her history teacher. I think. I know don't think it's English teacher. And I just thought it was delightful and it hits a lot of the same points and it feels more modern. It's a little bit. It doesn't take itself quite so serious though. It's still serious. And I think Harrelson's in great. And I think that teacher is reflecting in all these teacher moments. He's much more gruff. He ultimately comes through for her when she needs someone. But he's much more like, Jesus, come on. Can you pull? You know, it's. There's nothing really special about her except she keeps coming. And ultimately he will show up for her. But it's not because she is uniquely interesting and beautiful and wonderful and needs saving. It's like she shows up, she's as worth it as anybody else for him to like, pick her up one night and make sure she's okay. I'm going off book here a little bit.
- [88:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay.
- [88:36]
Jeff O'Neill
I think. I think if you're coming of age, let's expand our minds. There's lots of different ages to come up in an environment. We did Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. We did Little Women. I would suggest this was a huge hit that no one talks anymore about. Man Child in the Promised Land by Claude Brown.
- [88:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't know.
- [88:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Four million copies. It's about growing up in the inner city as a black man. And it was raw. And the realities of growing up in the 40s and 50s. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. She's 19, but she's moving the city and trying to make her way in the world. You know the other one, I was going to say here? Dante and Aristotle discover the secrets of the universe.
- [89:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, that's a great.
- [89:12]
Jeff O'Neill
Benjamin sayings. Two young Latino guys in the eighties in El Paso who are growing up figuring out their own sexuality, their relationship to each other. Some great parents in those books, if I recall correctly. Again, there's a lot of different. They're. They're hitting separate beats. But I guess what I'm finding is let's do like, you know, how they like to do a Shakespearean remake in like the world of high finance. Let's move these perspectives around. If you're trying to get more perspective on it now, especially if you're in one of these identity or one of these eras or any one of these geographical locations, it may speak Mujer directly. But if you like coming of age stories just to like them, spread around a little bit, see what else is out there. Take a walk with your reading.
- [89:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, go watch the new Netflix adaptation of Forever by Judy Bloom that's set in like contemporary LA about black teenagers dealing with revenge porn. And like all, all the ways that technology that they are surveilled and supervised, sort of a contrast to the story.
- [90:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Cocktail powder, cocktail party, crib sheets. Rebecca. I don't think people are bringing this up in a cocktail party that don't exist, but if they were, Rebecca, I
- [90:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
mean, the specifics of teen angst are different for all of us, but the themes of it are universal. Is the big takeaway. And also that few things in life are as magical as being with friends on a warm night with the windows down and your favorite song turned all the way up.
- [90:33]
Jeff O'Neill
I think that's pretty good. I think that's pretty good. Also though, when you haven't read any books, reading a book is great. Yeah, it is.
- [90:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is magic.
- [90:45]
Jeff O'Neill
Final beat. Our zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five vectors of evaluation are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read, cred, and oh damn factor. Historical importance. Rebecca is low.
- [91:00]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is.
- [91:00]
Jeff O'Neill
I think it's like it's not a 00, of course, but a 3. Like, yeah, it got a movie. People read it. 2 million Goodreads is not nothing. But does it stand out? Is it first amongst the YA or the coming of age classics? Stay tuned. I guess I would say no, but
- [91:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
it's more important in its time than it is now, I think.
- [91:20]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, readability is quite high. I would say.
- [91:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I would say a 9 or a 10. It's really easy to take down current
- [91:26]
Jeff O'Neill
relevance of central quest questions. We have I, I suppose made the arguments. This is a 9 or a 10.
- [91:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think it is. It's quite high.
- [91:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Quite high, I think. On the other hand, the book nerd read is quite low.
- [91:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Because it's like its historical position is a question mark. At this point. I think we're probably at. We're like at a two here.
- [91:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Three maybe.
- [91:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [91:52]
Jeff O'Neill
Any book at all is a one. Right. You get some credit.
- [91:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
Right.
- [91:56]
Jeff O'Neill
Oh damn factor. This was tricky for me because I may have underplayed how natural Chboski makes this feel. Right. I got a little hung up in our discussion here about the structure and narrative form and some of those meta things. But there's not outside of, you know, a couple of moments that feel like a little too, too. I want to give credit to naturalness.
- [92:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [92:20]
Jeff O'Neill
And I think it gets a little more credit. I mean, I can't go more above a 6, but I'll go above a 5.
- [92:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
And when the book was fresh, the Odam factor was high. Like it really hit the audience that it was intended to hit. So I think in the. In 1999 this would have been like an eight. But now I'll give it a six.
- [92:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Six. Something like that. Okay, cool. You can visit patriot.com 02 well read for detailed show notes. Free newsletter and membership options. You can follow us on social media at 02 well Read podcast and email us0towellread bookrat.com this is a klaxon for all you high school, middle school teachers, English teachers out there. You know what coming of age stories do kids relate to? Which ones? Maybe we don't know. How does this one evaluate? Please be our emissary into the hormone field. Needs maybe just a little bit more just deodorant ranks of the hallways of middle school and high school.
- [93:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
Never have I been so glad not to have children.
- [93:20]
Jeff O'Neill
I think one thing that's gone away is showering after gym class. I think that was that.
- [93:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, they don't make them do that anymore.
- [93:25]
Jeff O'Neill
I just don't think you do that anymore is my understanding. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. And Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca Hope you can find a CD of Counting Crows or a 90 Spotify playlist to blast on a warm summer evening sometime soon.