BEST BOOKS ON... TEENAGE ANGST
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
TEENAGE angst is like any other childhood illness — most kids catch it however hard you try to protect them. Of course, we all went through it, but our lives were hell, school was a misery, and parents were remote and unsympathetic. Or so we thought . . .
Now parents ourselves, we think everything should be rosy. Who can be angsty when being brought up in such model families as ours? Most teenagers, that’s who. Our struggle to make their lives perfect is no sort of antidote. Look at Holden Caulfield, troubled teen par excellence: when I first read Catcher In The Rye, I understood him so well.
The adult world was set against him, he was a bandit living outside the law for his own survival; cleverer, funnier, kinder than every grown-up around.
Now, I look at him and just feel for his poor mother. ‘Touchy as hell,’ is how he describes her. Perhaps, Holden, it’s because she has a son like you?
Because angst isn’t quite the same as, say, chicken pox: it’s difficult to be sympathetic to the suffering child.
It’s easy to forget, and harder still to remember what hell it was at the time. When your own child becomes unreachable, then perhaps fictional ones might remind you.
Like the ever wonderful Adrian Mole. On the face of it, he doesn’t have much to complain about, but he suffers — oh, how he suffers — nonetheless. The best thing, though, is that his misery is hilarious. If you’re not getting much family fun where you are, check in chez Mole and cheer yourself up.
Or for a first-hand account, S.E Hinton is always reliable. She’s extraordinary because she wrote about the teen world as a teenager. The Outsiders, about rival gangs, might seem remote and over-dramatic, but it’s clear to Hinton it was, in essence, true. And if your teenager also seems remote and over-dramatic, chances are this is a version of his or her own reality.
Read it like non-fiction: as a window into that foreign, adolescent world.