Interesting column by Jane Sullivan in The Age a few weeks back ostensibly about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, but what caught my eye was the following quote taken from a longer piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic about adolescent girls:
She is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs – to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others – are met precisely by the act of reading.I think this is a fantastic description of the importance of reading on the inner, secret emotional life of those inhabitants of the tricky interzone between child- and adulthood. I would disagree that this need is exclusively felt by female adolescents, but it is probably only teenage girls who would be able to meet these needs by stories about schoolgirls and a handsome envoy of the undead ...
Of course it is all a metaphor and a warning about the dangers of teenage sex or as the original article puts it – 'no writer, from Bram Stoker on, has captured so precisely what sex and longing really mean to a young girl'. Unless, of course, you discount Joss Whedon! But of course he was writing for TV and that doesn't count.
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