Tuesday, July 20, 2004 YA
Last week I went to the main library, and I felt a little lost. I checked the children's section and the young adult section, and I couldn't find any of the books that got me through the years before I could drive a car and after I'd gotten bored with sewing cards and Mr. Rogers. No Beverly Cleary, no Lois Lowery Anastasia books (although they did have Number the Stars), No Superfudge or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and worst of all, hardly any Paula Danziger.
I guess some kid like the kid I was could have gone in with a small truck and gotten all my old favorite books at once, but I don't think so. I checked the library website. You have to go to all kinds of farflung branches to get the Ramona books, yet I bet they have the Bible at all of them!
Then a few days ago, I found out that Paula Danziger herself http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1260530,00.html just died of a heart attack. She wrote books like The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, There's a Bat in Bunk Five, and, a favorite of both my sister's and my own, This Place Has No Atmosphere, which was about a young girl coming of age on the moon. We were used to living on the moon ourselves, so we related.
Here was an author who had incredible talent and insight into humanity, and she used it to write books for creepy little misfit kids and ugly teens. Her audience had pimples and braces, spare tire guts and divorced parents. They had the wrong clothes and no boyfriends. They were hard to like in the way that the painfully lonely always are. Extreme loneliness repulses people so much that it creates a bitey, nauseous cycle, unless maybe some charitable soul comes along and pays a token little attention to the lonely person. Even still, loneliness sees pity for what it is and while pity helps for a little while, it isn't sustainable. The vacuum that pity leaves behind once even it has gone makes loneliness something like a terminal disease.
Luckily, Paula Danziger's books never seemed to be written by someone with charity in mind. Instead, they poured out this empathy for losers that was nearly impossible to find anywhere else, and seemed to make whoever read them just a little bit less alone.
The cultural references in her books are older now, and I can see how they might go over people's heads, especially if those people are very young, but I can't see how the stories and the emotions would fail to age perfectly. She didn't patronize or pander, or write happy endings for the sake of happy endings.
I'm reverse-lonely these days. Instead of wishing for more people, more friends, and more love and attention, I would like everyone in the world to behave like reasonable and civilized ladies and gentlemen for a while, to see how it suits us. I don't wait by the phone, or use it much. If people seem interested in getting to know me, I tend to become interested in getting out while I can. This state of being has problems of its own, but I think back to being a lonely kid, and what that was like, and--Jesus. Just, yeah. Man.
I just hope ol' Paula Danziger knew how much she meant to the secret army of dry-elbowed slouchers with lisps and bad breath who hid out in libraries because we had to. I think she did. I think she knew it perfectly, bless her heart.
posted by Frenz | 7/20/2004 11:23:00 AM
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