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Years later, Iâm still looking for the thrill of the illicit book â something so riveting it feels wrong. And of course, itâs hard to relate to a female character whose only role in a story is to be murdered or discarded. They felt like narratives that were crafted from violence and sex for the sake of it, rather than to tell us some grand truth of life itself. Later I would graduate onto the harder stuff, but found the big male blockbusters, the likes of American Psycho and Junky and Lolita, lacking. They felt illicit, sure, but they also felt revelatory.Â
#THE THRILL OF THE CHASE: A MEMOIR BOOK BUY TV#
TV and movies and music and celebrity magazines gave us skewed depictions of sex and excess, and books allowed us to situate these things in real terms. But I think we used to read them to gain access to some new level of knowledge. If you were boringly well behaved (not entirely unlike teenage me), books like these could have felt like cautionary tales: stories that show you where the lines are and what actually happens if you stray outside them. The Virgin Suicides showed me a glimpse into a dangerous realm of girlhood, and gave me an early taste of the deafening power of the male gaze. Donna Tarttâs The Secret History is a campus novel that descends literally into bacchanal, and reading it set my own expectations for the university experience unforgivably high. There was A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a harrowing drug memoir later found to be fabricated, which set off my passion for the down-and-out addiction memoir. They felt illicit, sure, but they also felt revelatoryâ ÂTV and movies and music and celebrity magazines gave us skewed depictions of sex and excess, and books allowed us to situate these things in real terms. It did have some dirty bits, which we poured over not as a source of titillation but as something to discuss between us â was the sex on page 344 consensual, or not? And why did the character make the decisions she made in Chapter 14? It made me feel like I had tapped into a complicated world beyond my own boring routine where even small decisions carried weight.
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It was â how should I put this? â an absolute smash hit for our group of friends. There was White Oleander by Janet Fitch, an Oprah Book Club-certified page turner about a young girl whose artist mother goes to jail for murder, leaving her daughter in the foster care system in Los Angeles. (For one thing, I think teenagers are probably bombarded with enough of that outside of books.) It was something beyond all that that made us feel like a part of a different world. It wasnât about the explicit scenes or graphic details of sex, drugs and misery. It wasnât, I should say, that the books were titillating for us. It was a thrill to be handed the book at the back of a classroom one day, and then each following lunchtime report on where youâd gotten to. They got passed around our group like contraband cigarettes.
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And by the time it got to your group of friends, it has itself quite the reputation.Īt school my friends and I loved these books. Its publication might have caused a controversy in the press. Itâs what some wary parents might call ânot age-appropriateâ. If you, like me, were once a teenager who read a lot, youâll understand the kind of book Iâm about to talk about.