How novels targeted at teens engage narrator and reader in intimate
dramas of friendship, love, identity, and sexuality By examining the
novels of critically and commercially successful authors such as Sarah
Dessen (Someone Like You), Stephenie Meyer (the Twilight series), and
Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Reading Like a Girl explores the use of
narrative intimacy as a means of reflecting and reinforcing larger,
often contradictory, cultural expectations regarding adolescent women,
interpersonal relationships, and intimacy. Reading Like a Girl explains
the construction of narrator-reader relationships in recent American
novels written about and marketed to adolescent women. Sara K. Day
explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to
contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply
obsessed with reading these novels. Day coins the term "narrative
intimacy" to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and
reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the
story's narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the
inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and
the real expectations for adolescent women's relations prove to be
problematic. In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators
construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader, constructions that
allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidante, a safe and
appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer
frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the
narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal
and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently
threatening to physical and emotional health. And so, the narrator turns
to the reader for an ally who cannot judge. The reader, in turn, may
come to depend upon narrative intimacy in order to vicariously explore
her own understanding of human expression and bonds. Sara K. Day,
Magnolia, Arkansas, is assistant professor of English at Southern
Arkansas University. Her work has appeared in Studies of the Novel and
North Carolina Literary Review.
