3 posts tagged “childhood”
The question of the day is, "What character in a book can you connect with or relate to the most?" Thinking about it, I realized there was a progression of characters, moving from childhood onward, and to think about it too hard makes me kind of sad.
When I was a little girl, I was often compared to Ramona Quimby, from the Beverly Cleary books. I was rambunctious, overly curious, and had a goofy dutch-boy haircut and an eternally discontented older sister. Up until just a few years ago, I still bristled when anyone referred to their own childhood affinity for Ramona -- you weren't Ramona, I was Ramona!
After a brief stopover with tomboyish Kristy from the Babysitter's Club, I next glommed on to Anastasia Krupnik, as written by Lois Lowry. Anastasia was bookish and slighly socially awkward, with a bearded poet for a father. Here was an idol for my middle school years.
In high school, as I grew more depressed and self-destructive, though, I soon vocally espoused by resemblance to Elizabeth Wurtzel, handing out copies of Prozac Nation to people in an attempt to explain how I felt and why I was acting the way that I did. It still makes me squirm to think that I WANTED people to know that I related to this incredibly fucked-up woman, though I can take comfort in the fact that I was 15 at the time and Wurtzel was about 30. I was dealing with things much more productively, much earlier. And in my manic periods, I emulated Neil Gaiman's Delirium.
I am saddened to look back through these comparisons and see me move from happy-go-lucky energetic child to nerdy middle schooler to bipolar teenager. And where do I stand now? Who do I relate to at this point? I can't really think of anyone. I don't read a lot of fiction, you see, and most of the twentysomethings I encounter in today's literature are male Eggersian malcontents. When someone comes up with a good female character in their twenties, and I'm not talking about those brainsucks in chick lit books, give me a call.
When I was 5 years old, I made a video tape that had Frosty the Snowman and the Irwin Allen two-part celebrity-studded Alice in Wonderland special (which came out on DVD about a month after I bought a boot of it -- bogus). Alice in Wonderland was absolutely awesome. I made Segev watch it the other day and he thought it was awful. Which it is. But also awesome. What beats Sherman Helmsley in a mouse costume swimming in a river of tears singing about how much he hates dogs and cats? Nothing. Except maybe Carol Channing turning into a goat. The special also scared the bejeezus out of me, with the giant roaring lightning-flashy Jabberwocky that periodically appears. But then Lloyd Bridges sings a song and everything is all better. Sigh of relief.
I held onto the tape for a long time. I had it all through college. When I made the switch over to DVD completely, it had to go -- the only cassette I still have is The Jungle Book. Well, that and the Cher-fitness workout tape. But we won't talk about that.
I've added the newest Doonesbury book, "The War Years", to my books sidebar. It is actually just a compilation of two earlier books, "Peace Out Dawg" and "Got War", but it's all nice and hardcovery and shiny shiny. I like buying the Doonesbury books when they come out in larger format, as it...well, it just looks nicer on my shelf, and I am anal and obsessive compulsive like that. Why buy coffee table books if they're not going to look nice on your coffee table?
I think another reason I am invested in the large-format Doonesbury books is because that's how I first read the strip. My parents had a copy of the very first large-format Doonesbury book, "The Doonesbury Chronicles", when I was a child. Honestly, I think my mom got it as a present or something, because I never saw her reading it, but I picked it up at some point and loved it. Of course, I only got half the jokes. I remember very specifically asking my mom "What's Turkish Hashish?" after reading one strip in particular. And "What's a honky?" So I've been invested in the strip for a long time. I think it goes through strong periods and fallow periods, though I'm pretty much always happy when it focuses on Alex, Mike's teenage daughter. She's been a hoot for years now, starting with calling her mother's boyfriend "Uncle Stupidhead". It's so dumb, and yet something about the way Trudeau phrases it every time makes me laugh.
A couple of years ago, B.D., one of the main characters since the very first strip, lost his leg in Iraq. I remember that I happened to read the strip online that day, even though I hadn't read it in months, and I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. And yet what was really shocking, and really hit home, wasn't that in the last frame his leg was missing. It was that his helmet, which you never saw him without, was off. It was just this incredibly fragile moment, rendered really beautifully, that was designed to particularly affect people who had been reading for years. And I was so afraid he was going to die. I really was. Trudeau hasn't killed off a character in quite some time, and given that he's been doing the strip since the late '60s and the characters, though their ages have certainly been fudged quite a bit, are firmly in middle age now, they're due to start dropping if the strip keeps going. The only people that have died are Andy, a very minor character who appeared briefly in the late '70s as the token gay character and was then brought back in the late '80s to die of AIDS, Lacey, the congresswoman who was in her 80s even when she first appeared, and Mark's father, who was probably around 80 in the strip when he died. No primary characters. I fear for Joanie -- she's about 70 now. Yikes. 70. That seems impossible, but I was just reading strips in the book from 2002 and she cops to being 66. So yeah, 70. I kinda dread the potential for total baby-boomer angst as these characters age even further, but it will be interesting to see what develops. In the meantime, I will continue to laugh at Uncle Stupidhead, Zonker, and even Duke, though his prominence irritates me a lot of the time.
