YA New York

Hello there.

I’ve been recovering from yet another bout of illness, this time necessitating a brief stay in the hospital. (The food there was awful, I must say!) Anyway, that is to explain my recent absence, and I must admit I’m not yet up to updating regularly.

But there are more important things afoot: My alma mater, New Rochelle High School, has removed pages from Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, which seniors are reading in class. The offending pages? Mentioned oral sex.

Oh noes! S-E-X? The horror!

Now look here: There are plenty of teen books that are much more graphic than Girl, Interrupted, which is really a fantastic memoir about struggling with borderline personality disorder — although I must admit I disagree with some of Kaysen’s conclusions, it’s a good book and a fascinating read.

I don’t disagree with her inclusion of the topic of S-E-X, though. Because, let’s face it: teens know about these things. Indeed, when I was a wee girl of seventeen — a very bratty one, too — my health teacher went into quite a lot of detail about various sexual acts. Of course she provided these details so that we students would be able to protect ourselves from STIs, but she provided the info nonetheless.

And you know, not everything we read in high school was so very chaste. I vividly remember a discussion about The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which some of us couldn’t help but wonder if the book featured a woman having … err … improper relations with a young boy. There was also the day, when I was a lass of fourteen, that my English teacher stood in the hallway ringing a bell and shouting, “It’s the sex scene! It’s the sex scene!” because we were watching Romeo and Juliet (the awesome seventies version) and our teacher wanted to make sure everyone was in attendance that day. When we did indeed watch the sex scene.

We watched Schindler’s List, too, unedited. And we read other inflammatory books.

The school administration’s decision to bowdlerize a book is not something I appreciate. Ripping pages out? Really? This is what you do to protect teenagers? And from what, exactly?

I should mention that New Rochelle, New York is a rather liberal city. It’s not a bit podunk or backwater or anything like that. And I don’t recall there being any censorship issues with the school newspaper or the school literary magazine when I was there oh-so-many years ago.

Which makes it even more disappointing that the district would rip pages out of a book.

But let’s face it: censorship is a rite of passage. All our favorite teen authors have been banned somewhere by someone. When Rachel Vail wrote recently of her children’s book being banned, I was of half a mind to congratulate her and half a mind to console her.

Although, at the end of the day, the “rite of passage” argument doesn’t make it any less frustrating that people can be closed-minded and, frankly, idiotic.

ml,
brina