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From Jennifer Donnelly’s THE TEA ROSE:

“It’s never been alright. Not since the day I walked up these stairs and walked away from you. I ‘urt you that day, I know I did, but all you lost was me. I ‘urt myself a million times worse because I lost you.”

From MY SO-CALLED LIFE’s should’ve-been-penultimate episode (damn you, “Weekend”), “The Betrayal”:

Angela: Look, I don’t care anymore, okay? So just go away.

Rayanne: You’re not the only one who got hurt.
Angela: Well, forgive me if I can’t feel sorry for you, Rayanne.
Rayanne: You lost nothing, Angela. You lost a lousy, selfish friend, a guy you never really had… you lost nothing! …. I lost a really good friend! I lost everything.

And then comes the part where I cry and cry. It’s better on the show than in the book.

Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.

It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.

And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”

When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:

I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.

Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.

It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”

MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!

I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.

My friend Iain reminds me that,

It was fifteen years ago to-day that Angela Chase dyed her hair. Television
drama was never the same again. It was real. Not some la-la-la land where
everyone was happy all the time. Not some far-off place where things were
packaged into 43-minute chunks, everyone knew their place, and everything was
neatly resolved.

And pulls out an old set of questions:

1. Which character to you most identify with?
2. Why?
3. Which character would you most want to bang?
4. Why?
5. Favorite Episode?
6. What would you have Corey Helfrick paint on your shoes if given the chance?

I’ll throw out a question of my own: What moments of the show do you experience the most differently today, compared to when you first saw it? (Whenever that was… sometime during the MTV years, for most of us.) And what parts do you think you will always view the same way?

My own answers later.

From Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS (Advance Reader Copy; may be different in the version available in stores and libraries). The number is the calorie-counting the anorexic narrator does throughout the book:

When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer of [honey] (30) and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don’t notice her pretending.

…Now if only it’d been “pour a cup of coffee, black, with three or four sugars,” we’d be in a whole other realm of My So-Called Life reference. But anyways. This is from THE SWEET FAR THING by Libba Bray:

“I said, don’t look now,” Felicity hisses through clenched teeth. “The key is to make it seem as if you do not notice their attention.”

It may seem tenuous to connect these two quotes, which after all, don’t really have much in common. But what they do have in common is that they both totally echo this classic line from the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE:

ANGELA (voice-over): Like with boys, how they have it so easy! How you have to pretend you don’t notice them, noticing you.

Of course, since this is television, that line precedes an ironic segue — in this case, a brilliant one, to Brian getting shoved up against some lockers. Oh, Angela. What don’t you notice, indeed.