Charlie is entering high school alone. His best friend, Michael, has died by suicide. Charlie writes his thoughts, fears and life updates in letters addressed only to a “Dear Friend.” Soon, though, Charlie meets Sam, a caring and magnetic senior with an undeserved reputation, and her stepbrother Patrick, who is harboring a secret relationship with the quarterback of the football team. Together, Patrick, Sam and Charlie create an island all their own. They help Charlie find his footing and then himself.
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” honestly grapples with adolescent anguish, the numbing pain of a close death, the pressure to conform, and the generational toll of sexual abuse within a family. But at its core, it is a story about the power of friendship. Sam and Patrick offer Charlie the steady ground to find himself. They are shelter from the storm that is the typical pain of high school and the additional trauma Charlie is facing. They help Charlie understand the insight captured in the book’s most famous quote and most enduring message: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” Friendship, in the pages of this book, is life-or-death.
Admittedly, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is one of those books that is not so easily summarized. The themes the book addresses are dark and heavy, but it doesn’t read that way. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is sweet and poignant. Accurately so. That is high school, that is adolescence: the painful meeting of adulthood, lingering childhood naïvete and teenage feelings. It is not easy to strike that note, right at the crossroads of those three things, but Chbosky does it again and again. The result is a book that is so specific in its story, its frequent ’90s cultural references and its nuanced characters that it feels universal. This book’s power is its ability to reach so many.
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” masterfully uses outside elements as windows into the characters, including carefully placed literature. The reader sees Charlie’s grow and change through the many novels his beloved English teacher assigns him. “I have finished ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.” Charlie reads “Peter Pan,” “The Great Gatsby,” “A Separate Peace,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “On the Road” and “The Fountainhead.” Patrick, grappling with his sexuality and his first love, is given “The Mayor of Castro Street.” Charlie’s brother says his new girlfriend’s favorite book is “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.
Like many of those books, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has been targeted for ban again and again — nearly every year since its publication in 1999. I don’t need to say why. Every detail that makes this book emotionally resonant and culturally necessary are the very reasons it is targeted. There are terrible things that happen in the pages of this book — rape, sexual assault and homophobia — but they are things that happen in real life, off the page. Books can save a life — and help those who have been left behind to carry on, too.
This is an excerpt from the December 9 edition of the “Ali Velshi Banned Book Club.” Keep listening and learning along with Velshi on his “Banned Book Club” podcast.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Hannah Holland
Hannah Holland is a producer for MSNBC's "Velshi" and editor for the "Velshi Banned Book Club." She writes for MSNBC Daily.