Cailin Flanagin, "The Things I Would Never Do" Atlantic Dec 23, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/
I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.
There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!
I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, as square and tame as I am.
COMMENT
A work of fiction not only helps a teen shape her own adult identity, the experience of reading it has such a lasting impact that she uses it as the theme for an article written many, many years later. This narrative illustrates the long-term impacts of libraries. Would Caitlin Flanagan have found Joan Didion if the school library didn't have it?
