Dear Teen Me

This week a letter I wrote is featured on the popular blog Dear Teen Me, a site where YA authors write letters to their former teen selves. It’s an inversion of the grade eight guidance exercise where you had to write a letter to your future self. Initially I thought these letters would be full of boring, wholesome platitudes like “be yourself” and “things come out okay in the end.” Instead the letters are intensely personal stories, mini memoirs, with lots of teenage blood and gore.

My first attempt to write my Dear Teen Me letter were full of boring platitudes (Just relax! Don’t stress!), but when I started digging deeper, I started remembering some intense high school memories. I had to stop and take a couple of deep breaths. I remembered things so

intensely personal and shameful that I couldn’t possibly imagine sharing them online. It also felt masochistic to relive some of those experiences, even for the purpose of educating or entertaining others.

I did manage to write a letter to myself that is deeply personal and a hard to read, but doesn’t make me look like a complete idiot. You can read it at www.dearteenme.com. In the mean time, here are some shorter memos to myself in the same teenage vein.

Dear Teen Me,

When you go to France, please don’t tell your host family you came to meet men. It doesn’t go over well and you have to move to another family. Yes, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this story later, but at the time it’s devastating. So please, use a dictionary. You came to France to meet people, les gens, not les hommes.

Dear Teen Me,

When you have a party, don’t let the boys throw the beer bottles in your trash cans behind your house. Your father will come home, recycle them and make tame comments about the boys from the nearby school drinking in the lane. Then your mother will show up at your Hebrew school bottle drive with a station wagon full of beer bottles and also not say a word. Their total silence will

drive you bonkers.

Dear Teen Me,

Please don’t tell your sister to f-off in front of the rabbi during your bat mitzvah pictures. It makes your parents REALLY unhappy.

Dear Teen Me,

If you’re going to lie to your parents about where you’re going for the weekend (Sin Island), get your friends to cover for you. Otherwise they’ll know your parents are worrying about where you are and feel obliged to call and tell them. This isn’t good for anyone’s relationship.

Dear Teen Me,

If you’re going to fall off your sister’s bed and get gouged by the metal frame, please get stitches instead of “just using a band aid.” It’ll leave a smaller scar and you won’t have to wear shorts in February to accommodate the massive bandage on your leg.

Please feel free to share your own hopefully embarrassing Dear Teen Me moments.

 

The Painted Girls by Cathy Buchanan

For my birthday I received a copy of Cathy Buchanan’s The Painted Girls, which has been on the New York Times Best Seller List for quite some time. I was excited to read the book not only because I had heard great things about it in the press, but because I also know Cathy. I met her through my friend Ania Szado, also a great writer with a new book out- Studio St. X. A number of years ago Cathy invited me to her home to meet author Brian Francis, author of Fruit and we’ve kept in touch loosely since I moved away from Toronto.          

So does Cathy’s book live up to the hype? You’d just have to ask my children how I ignored them for large swathes of the Easter weekend with my nose in her book to answer that question. Yes, Cathy’s book is really great. Set in the belle époque period of Paris in the 1880’s, it tells the story of two sisters living in the poverty stricken world of Montmatre. Like all good historical fiction, The Painted Girls takes you deep into the Paris demimonde with its meticulous research. The book is narrated by Marie and Antoinette Van Goethem. With their father dead and their mother addicted to absinthe, theses two young girls must find a way to support themselves. Marie becomes a dancer at the Paris Opéra and then a model for Degas’ Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. Antoinette works as an extra in Emilie Zola’s play L’Assommoir. Cathy describes the girls’ attempts to survive in a world where poor women have little protection in a deeply moving and compelling way. I was swept up by The Painted Girls not only by the sisters’ rivalry and the period details, but also because it provided a female view into the time period. Instead of the erotic male gaze, the book gives voice to the underclass of women who served as their models and this was a welcome change to the experience of viewing Impressionist paintings. 

I’m looking forward more of Cathy’s books. In the mean time, I have CS Richardson’s The Emperor of Paris to keep me occupied with all things francais.