And healthy, boring dyads seem to be what sanctioned teen entertainment is all about. In 
the eighties, you had Judy Blume's training-bra classics and softcore porn like Do You 
Love Me, Harvey Burns? In the nineties, you had Francesca Lia Block's L.A. fairytales. 
Now, teen girls have Louise Rennison's books about the engagingly pouty heroine Georgia 
Nicolson (Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, etc.), which, while charming, are about 
pretty standard stuff: fights with mom, kissing boys, feeling ugly. Then you have Sophie 
Kinsella's Shopaholic series, pure proto-socialite drivel about a ditz who just can't stop 
buying accessories on credit. From the Amazon summary: "Becky's ten-month globe-trot with 
hubby Luke was a shopping spree disguised as a honeymoon — heck, Becky will walk across hot 
coals for an aquamarine necklace…" 

    Girls: reading these books is a BIG MISTAKE. Not only is this soulless genre, with its 
"look how unsexy sex can be" posturing, way too shallow for a growing mind, it only expands 
the chasm between you and men. What one needs from a boyfriend or husband, at any age, is 
empathy and companionship, and the more Women are from Venus bullshit one indulges in, the 
more difficult it is to bridge the gender gap. Whenever you're setting up human relationships 
as a game (<u>The Rules</u>, <u>He's Just Not That Into You</u>) or a glamorous lifestyle 
choice wherein you dress up and spend most of your time talking with your girlfriends or your 
journal about how exasperated men make you (<i>Sex and the City</i>, <i>Bridget Jones' 
Diary</i>), you're never going to see men as fallible, mortal beings looking for 
understanding just like you are. 

    Chick-lit heroines are like the pettiest and most practical characters in a Jane Austen 
novel come to life, minus charm or patience. It's all frantic screwing-cute with no time for 
anything to steep, whereas Ford and company — they know from steeping. Everything is 
mystifying for these confused, angst-ridden heroes — even getting up in the morning, which 
is why these books stop being good reading once you hit your twenties and need to stop stewing 
and get on with things. 

As a ten-year-old girl, my first cassette tapes were (and how this happened I'll never know): 
Huey Lewis, Phil Collins and Weird Al. Hipper friends quickly swooped in with with Depeche 
Mode and the Violent Femmes, but the damage was done: from an early age, I deeply identified 
with the cultural output of that demographic. And after the obligatory Jane Austen and Brönte 
sisters phase, I got obsessed with random older male authors I found purely by chance at used 
bookstores (if the back cover referred to its aging hero as "tortured" my babysitting money 
was as good as spent): 

    Richard Ford, Tom Spanbauer, Joe Coomer, J. D. Salinger, Lewis Shiner, Philp K. Dick, Denis 
Johnson... I was smitten. I even liked Harry Crews, whose genuinely terrifying Southern Gothic 
books — getting tattooed when you're blackout-drunk in Alaska, accidentally killing a hawk you're 
trying to train, watching a cockfight — taught me everything I needed to know about the darkness 
of the soul. And it sure put not being invited to some cool-kids party in perspective. Hey, I may 
be sitting at home alone, I could think, but at least I'm not an alcoholic living in a shack in 
the woods with a dead bird in my closet. I just sort of wanted to date one. 

    As refuge from perpetually disappointing teenage boyfriends, I pined in a romantic fashion 
for dozens of older male authors, alive (Sam Shepard) and dead (Tolstoy). Falling for a narrator 
is weird. It entails a curiously absorbing sensation of wanting to simultaneously be and sleep 
with the person who owns the voice that's entered your head. When you already share so much 
intellectual bandwidth with someone, you lose yourself a little. But when your life consists of 
baffling social scenarios, pop quizzes, and drug experimentation, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. 

    Think Lost in Translation Bill Murray, in narrator form, whispering his frustrations into 
your ear while you stay up all night, thoroughly at sea in a twin bed in your parents' house. 
Is it any wonder I wanted nothing to do with the young-adult novels and feminist literature 
calculated to make me a well-adjusted young woman? Sure, I skimmed Possessing the Secret of 
Joy, but joy gets old; I was interested in other secrets — secrets like what it feels like to 
walk up to the door of the home where you live with your wife and children and not want to 
go inside. 


- Ada Calhoun