Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature by Sara K. Day (review)

According to Sara K. Day, adolescent female readers in contemporary America so strongly desire to identify with literary characters that they blur the line between fiction and real life. In Reading Like a Girl, Day explores this phenomenon, arguing that authors of young adult literature “actively encourage” this identification by purposely constructing “narrative intimacy,” or “narrator-reader relationships that reflect, model, and reimagine intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share” (3).

In chapter 1, “She Is a Creature Designed for Reading,” Day explains why she refers to the teenagers and young women who read these novels as “adolescent women,” asserting that adolescence “has stretched to more than a decade, as young people postpone or reject the milestones . . . that traditionally signaled entrance into adulthood” (8). She accurately states that adolescent women in particular face conflicting expectations and demands in regard to creating intimate relationships, with prevailing cultural narratives advising them to disclose their thoughts and feelings to their friends, families, and significant others while simultaneously warning them of the dangers inherent in doing so. With the reader positioned outside a text, narrators can fully disclose their thoughts without becoming vulnerable to the reader’s whims; likewise, the reader can enjoy disclosure without feeling the need to reciprocate. Through her analysis, Day explores how narrative intimacy creates distinct relationships between narrators and readers, depending on the authors’ goals and cultural assumptions about intimacy.

Day draws on reader-response theories and humanist inquiry to form her theoretical foundation (18). She cites Seymour Chatman’s diagram of the multilayered author/reader relationship in support of her decision to focus solely on books with main characters who are also first-person narrators, explaining that each individual narrator is “a character who speaks for and about herself, offering at her own discretion the details that may allow for an intimate relationship between her and the reader” (14). Day designates Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994) as one of the texts that first drew scholarly attention to adolescent females issues, and includes self-help books, fan fiction, and other popular media sources in her discussion of narrative intimacy in order to incorporate more recent examples of texts that take part in “shaping cultural expectations about adolescent womanhood, interpersonal relationships, and intimacy” (24).

Day qualifies her exploration of narrative intimacy in contemporary American young adult literature early in her first chapter, stating that she is “primarily concerned with the concept of the adolescent woman as white, middle class, and heterosexual,” a “norm” that she readily admits largely ignores adolescent readers outside these parameters (10). Day’s decision to narrow her study to this degree, she clarifies, is an attempt to “demonstrate that narrative intimacy in popular works for adolescent women . . . problematically informs young women’s understandings of intimacy by clearly establishing representations that do not allow for lived experiences outside of the ‘norm’” (12). She elucidates these problems in the four chapters that follow, as she explores the capricious nature of narrative intimacy in twenty-two young adult novels and multiple self-help books written for adolescent (read: white, middle-class, heterosexual) female audiences. In her final chapter, Day extends her study past these constraints, exploring how fan texts “engage with, reimagine, and often subvert” narrative intimacy, giving readers power over the extent to which it affects their beliefs about a text’s narrator and author, as well as their own identities as adolescent women (183).

In chapter 2, “Opening Myself Like a Book to the Spine,” Day borrows a metaphor from Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon, in which narrator Colie expresses to the reader her inability to open up to her fellow female characters. Colie eventually does gain friends, but the inclusion of a group of “bitchy girls” in the story “draws attention to...