Thirteen Reasons Why to Read this Young Adult Novel Whether or not Your Children Can (Part Two)

So true to the title of this blog, let me give you thirteen reasons you should pick up Asher’s book now. 

Reading this young adult novel can help us start thinking seriously about how to promote our childrens’ abilities to develop healthy relationships with their friends now, for the long term . . . and promote their abilities to develop a healthy relationship with their own selves, no matter what and who they become.

It can remind us that silence can be irrevocably destructive; as a parent, it is better to start a conversation, than to wait for it to happen.

It can encourage us to reflect on the cultural messages and images our children have access to in our homes and beyond, particularly (as is evident in this novel) those in which the objectification and sexualization of young women is a norm; as a consequence, the book helps us think about how to address, interrupt, and challenge those messages for and with our children.

It fosters really important considerations about how closely we listen when our children talk about their days and lives now, and to set better patterns of engagement . . . so that they know they can rely on those communication lines being open when they need them later. 

It helps us to start conversations with other people who we think may be addressing these issues right now — teens in our lives, parents and educators; it also enables us to start thinking seriously about how much we are invested in knowing and conversing with our childrens’ friends now, in order to build those communication lines we will seek out and rely on later.

It provides an invaluable opportunity to observe the subtle and diverse varieties of bullying that are happening, so as to normalize our discussion of bullying with our children.  If they can understand it as a social phenomenon, they can recognize it early.    

Reading the book can also provide an invaluable opportunity for our children to see us read.

Moreover, the novel can inspire us to start conversations with our children about the feeling of shame . . . about how their own felt sense shame when they break the cookie jar or lie can be destructive or instructive: destructive when they choose to suffer it in silence, instructive when they allow us and others who love them to help them address it and work through it.  It's a lesson that translates.

Lastly, the novel encourages us to reflect on how we overlook and elide conversations with people who, in that moment, just may need us most.   

One thing the novel doesn't address is something for which we can turn to the suicides that have happened in the past year: how technology facilitates the bullying process.  Thinking about the forces of cyber bullying, in conjunction with Thirteen Reasons Why, can help us, as parents, to establish clear parameters for our childrens’ use of technology.  It can inspire us to have important and repeated discussions with them about the ethical and moral responsibilities that come with having access to phone, facebook, and video/audio technologies.  

This is a novel that inspires reflection, critical thinking, engagement.  It's a great read, and an important read to read now. . . and again with your children as they enter young adulthood.


Part One 

Thirteen Reasons to Read This Young Adult Novel Whether or Not Your Children Can

Several weeks ago I unexpectedly found myself with an extra 36 hours on hand and absolutely nothing to occupy them, having missed the flight that would get me home.   Though I sorely itched to get there, the layover ended up being a rather convenient inconvenience; I can’t remember the last time I had so much unabridged time to read.

The second of the three novels I had the chance to sweep through in Terminal G really left its mark. 

For several months, both on NPR and in bibliophile circles, I had been hearing about this sleeper hit — Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why.   When I hit Hudson Books and saw it on the racks, I picked it up eagerly.

While initially marketed as a young adult novel at its release in 2007, Thirteen Reasons has a much broader audience following the tragic suicides that made national headlines last year . . . young men and women such as Tyler Clementi, Phoebe Prince, and Raymond Chase, youth who killed themselves in response to the bullying that either slowly, or violently, eroded their self worth and their sense of hope in the future.  As bullying has once again became an topic of national discourse, so this book has started to help frame a dialogue for educators, parents, and young adults.

Thirteen Reasons begins as high school student Clay Jensen finds a package lying on his stoop.  Inside are 7 tapes, each one numbered in succession.  Curious, he goes to the garage, where his dad keeps the old boom-box with a tape deck.  He pops the first tape in.  Wafting over the air, he hears the unmistakable voice of Hannah Baker, a girl in his class who killed herself with an overdose of prescription drugs barely two weeks earlier. 

Before she actually did the deed, Hannah had decided for her death not to be in vain; in the days leading up to her suicide, she made thirteen recordings.   They not only recounted the events that played a role in her decision to kill herself, but identified the people who played a role.  As she states at the beginning of tape one:

“The rules are pretty simple.  There are only two.  Rule number one: You listen.  Number two: You pass it on.  Hopefully, neither one will be easy for you.”

The tapes were to make their rounds to each person involved in her death . . . to be listened by each person in their entirety . . .  or a second copy would be released to the public.

It was a guerilla tactic, perhaps, but one which creates a framing device for this novel, which recounts Clay’s struggle to make sense of his role in the affair — an interior monologue that runs parallel to the monologue Hannah has recorded on her tapes.  


As he moves through their town, a celebrant at the altar of all the sites in which she was slowly, silently degraded into despair, he becomes increasingly aware that the violences we are capable of committing to another person take all forms: carelessness, silence, rumor, emotional manipulation, objectification, outright aggression and, of course, passive aggression.

We readers become increasingly aware of them too.


This book made me reflect on my own adolescence: was this how it was when I was in high school?  I don’t know.  . .  to say I was oblivious of the goings on of high school is an understatement; I was an absolute social moron, and rather embraced it. 

Perhaps that saved me. . . more likely, I think now, it made me unwittingly part of the problem. 

Whether your children are 2 or 12, the time to read Thirteen Reasons Why is now.  Read it to prepare yourselves for thinking about the world that our children are entering into.  It is one where bullying takes extraordinary new forms: it is often sexualized, it often involves refined acts of psychological manipulation, and it all too often is a contagion, wholly inescapable for its victims, due to the powers of internet technology.

Part Two

The Lexicon of Us: Crafting a Family Dictionary

Several weeks ago, Miss S. came into the kitchen preoccupied with her hair again.  I am beginning to suspect it may be the cross she has to bear from this point onward . . . at least until the real metamorphoses begin in her late twenties. 

That morning I tried not to make notice of how, as she moved between the pantry and the refrigerator, her hands kept on fluttering up, like restless hummingbirds, straightening and smoothing her thick, dark tresses.  

Finally she couldn’t take it any longer.  “Mom, is my hair straight?  It feels tallywallytopsicated.”

 
“It’s lovely.  You look just like Veronica Lake.” 
 
A huge sigh was exorcised as she stared wearily at me and said nothing.  Finally she spun on her heels, defeated, and turned to leave the room.  “Fine.  I will marry Paris.”
 
“You mingo!” Pads charged her with between mouthfuls of cereal.

I laughed in spite of myself at the exchange, which anybody else would think gibberish: Tallywallytopsicated?  Mingo?  What does marrying Paris have to do with anything, and who the heck is Veronica Lake?

We, of course, know . . . but then that’s the point.

Every discourse community, be it a family or otherwise, uses language idiomatically, that is, in an idiosyncratic way.  Some references emerge in one generation and thrive . . .  others ride the skirts of emergent cultural forces . . . still others are spawned from the personal whimsy of a speaker.

Language is no different than a gorgeous, motley fingerprint that each of us leaves over everything we touch and feel and see, really. . . and though we hardly ever notice the smear of it in the context of speaking  . . . the trace of the words we use identify us uniquely.

The joyful challenge is to learn to pay attention to how we, and others, use language, and what the language each of us uses silently says about us.

“We’re going to write a family dictionary,” I told Miss S. later that day.  “We’re going to write dictionary definitions for all the expressions we use at home.”

“Why?” Miss S. asked, all but rolling her eyes.

 “Well . . . so that other people who come to visit might be able to figure out what we’re talking about,” I replied, “And so that you and Pads have a better idea of the history of where some of these words and expressions come from. “

“Okay. . . “ she replied warily.  “Can we begin with tallywallytopsicated, since I made that word up?”

“You bet.”

I sent S. to get the dictionary, and we opened it up.  Choosing the entry for the word case at random, I explained why all the parts of a dictionary definition are there:  spelling, syllable analysis, phonetic spelling, grammatical structure, definition, context, synonym and antonym families, and — as is in the case of my favorite dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical record of a word’s first use. 

 S. wasn’t so much as impressed with my explanation of the purpose of each part of an entry as she was using the entry as a model for her own entry:

Taly/waly/top/sicated.  She wrote diligently (with my guidance).

 
“What does it mean, exactly?” I asked her, having always assumed before that it meant crazy, given the contexts I had heard the word in.

 “It means. . . “ she thought silently for a moment, “dizzy and hot.”

We wrote the phonetic spelling and definition down, along with a sentence for context.  In the final word, Miss S.’s first entry looked like this:

Taly/waly/top/sicated:  [talie walie top sick ated] (adj.): 1. Dizzy and hot.  I am talywalytopsicated after going on the rollercoaster.  Orig. Miss S., general speech. 2011.

This last honorarium delighted her, as did the discovery of the origins of the Veronica Lake reference, and that of ‘I will marry Paris’, which she wrote in subsequent entries:

“Fine, I will marry Paris” (exp.): 1. Whatever, I have no more to say about that.  You want me to clean the dishes?  Fine, I will marry Paris.  Orig. Mom, Uncle Gwa, William Shakespeare, and Jerry Springer.  1995.

“You look like Veronica Lake” (exp.): 1. Your hair is beautifully wavy in the fashion of Veronica Lake, a famous actress from the 1930s and 40s.  Orig. Great Grandma Dorothy, general speech.  1970. 

As we wrote the expressions down, I filled her mind with moving pictures of my young adulthood and childhood. . . of my grandmother telling me my hair looked as lovely as Veronica Lake’s one morning as I entered her kitchen as a child, and then having me watch the classic comedy The Major and the Minor with her, so that I could see whom it was that she was talking about .  .  .

Each word a world of family memory, of shared contexts.

“Hey mingo!” Pads said coming into the room, to no one in particular.

Miss S. and I looked at each other and laughed, gathering up our entries.   It would be a few years before we could have him write up a dictionary definition for that one.

The Most Important Story We'll Ever Write

Late summer.  As the cicadas yield their song to crickets, I am overcome by the presence of someone whom I have never met.  For hours at a time, I find myself carrying on animated conversations with her, becoming forgetful and preoccupied in our silent communion.  This oratory in my head provides the basis for a letter which I write each year to this woman . . .  and then stick in a black letter box, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent. 

As my son’s birthday approaches, I know that I am not the only one watching his movement thinking about the milestones he has reached in the past year and imagining those to shortly come.  Half a world away, in a perpetually green and verdant land, there is another mother silently marking the days to the anniversary of the day in which she gave birth to a baby boy.  Perhaps she too writes a letter to him, as she did after his birth . . .  and then she too sticks it in a box shuffled away somewhere, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent.

 Adoption is often filled with such silent observances of grief.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how our home, our story as a family, is filled with gaps — full of anecdotes and infant pictures of one child, lacking for the other.  A genetic inheritance we can map across one child’s personality and physique, and can only intuit in the other.

As my son matures, he will begin to not only see these gaps, but feel them, as if they were black holes in the story that connects him to us.  Even now, as he asks for pictures of himself as a baby, I wonder if he notices that within the pictures I show him of himself, he is a chubby faced toddler, rather than a newborn in arms.  

When we are born, we enter a story
to which we may or may not have access.
For adoptive families, this can be a
source of grief. 

Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that we are born at least twice — once, in body, and second, into a narrative — a story of the people (family, nation, religious group, etc.) which we are born into.  Our full development involves mastering these narratives, and then integrating them into a narrative which we alone can tell.

With this in mind, I feel the need to prepare the space in which he can enter the story of his life, a story that will both honor his journey home to us, and that will create opportunities for him to ask questions about it.

This year for his birthday, we are creating a book that will tell the story of my son’s journey home.  

The plot will have some significant gaps, not all the characters will have names, and the book may be riddled with increasing numbers of unaddressed letters.  Soon enough, he will begin to have questions, but most importantly, he will have a story he can recognize as his own.