Last summer, my kiddo received a reading list from our new high school. Choose any two books off the “want to” list plus one off the “have to” list. The “have tos” were all coming-of-age stories, from the hoary A Separate Peace to modern tales featuring basketball or female protagonists. Kiddo chose David Lubar’s Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie
My kiddo’s challenge in September was to write an essay about the “have to” book – which character did you most identify with, and why.
Now, my kiddo is special needs, and regular-track classes only work with some accommodations and occasional therapeutic interventions. There were no books on the “have to” list featuring a main character like that. After a week of thinking, kiddo said, “I know I’m supposed to identify with the protagonist in this story, but I just don’t. Compared to what I’ve been through, this guy’s problems are a cake walk.”
Kiddo settled on the character known as Mouth, for his incessant talking. He isn’t the only character being bullied, and he insists it’s fine. It isn’t, and by the spring of freshman year, Mouth tries (and fails) to hang himself. He lands first in the hospital (with only our protagonist for a visitor) and then in another school, so he can start over.
Like many special needs students, kiddo is familiar with the epic social fail school can become. Kiddo’s new brick-and-mortar high school follows cyber middle school, and both were changes we made to give kiddo fresh starts of the kind Mouth needed but didn’t get until after his crisis.
The essay kiddo produced was very mature. The warning signs for Mouth in the book – no obvious friends at a new school, being in a situation which one was supposed to love but which didn’t feel that way at all, pretending, knowing there were others out there who were also pretending but being unable to connect with them – were, kiddo wrote, beginning to resurface in real life. We had some deep, calm conversations while kiddo was preparing to write. Know the warning signs, know your personal triggers, know that suicide is not a “romantic” way out, know that somewhere out there somebody really cares about you and it’s the situation you need to hate. Though not as fluently written, all of the foregoing went into the essay’s conclusions.
I was never prouder of the heavy lifting kiddo’s done all through school, and specifically during months of individual therapy. At least until the end of September. That’s when kiddo’s teacher finally graded the last of the essays. She called in the counseling and administrative cavalry, convinced she had an imminent offing on her hands. Imagine that phone call, in which you as parent have to tell your child’s brand-new counselor they’re three years behind the curve.
Now imagine guiding that same kiddo through Of Mice and Men, wherein the intellectually disabled character, prone to violent outbursts, is put out of his misery with a bullet in the back of his head, fired by his guardian. Or To Kill a Mockingbird, featuring the “not right” Boo Radley spending his adult years under family-imposed house arrest. Next up, Romeo and Juliet, the story of obsessive teenage lovers kept apart, wherein one character decides faking suicide and running away from home are her best options, and the other character kills himself in despair.
Is this canon really the best we can do? If the literary characters with mental health issues students read about are always marked for confinement or death, then we’re not moving the ball on diversity, acceptance, or even opening pathways to conversation. Considering that one in five students will have an intervention-worthy mental health issue prior to high school graduation, better perspectives are needed.
From my own bookshelves, then, I suggest the following. Begin with Doreen McGettigan’s eye-opening memoir cum review of mental health care in the modern age, The Stranger in My Recliner
Read fiction books narrated by characters with mental health conditions: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy, and William Wharton’s Birdy. Move on to fallout from mental-health-related deaths in Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons and Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato. Spot all the unconventional characters with symptoms of mental health issues in The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer. Try rereading Louis Sachar’s Holes with what you know now of bullying, or revisit the kids trapped in the doomsday cult of Armageddon Summer by Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville.
If we must do “the canon,” turn it on its head. Read Hamlet, but chase it with Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Slog through Beowulf, and then immediately reach for John Gardner’s Grendel. Try an epic tale in graphic-novel form: Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman, or the origin story for almost any superhero.
And while we’re at it, revisit Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Other than Christopher Robin, the characters are a hyperactive tiger, an owl sliding into dementia, a phobic pig, a depressed donkey, a kangaroo who leads with her heart instead of her head, a rabbit who’d like everyone to think he’s smart, and an intellectually disabled bear. Which character did you most identify with, and why? Now THERE’S a set of essays I’d like to read.
Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
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