Most of all, I find myself considering Patrick and his trials with love as a queer teen in a hostile society.
I realize that behind these characters’ eccentric lives of excitement and awe lies the weight of emotions, depression, and anxiety prevalent in modern youth, dragging the high points back down. However, another year later, I look back to this story without that lust for life, and instead with a more solemn perspective. Watching the movie a year later rekindled a similar desire for the parties, the sex, the drugs, the utter “life” that I thought everyone around me was living. When I first read the book during my Junior year of high school, I connected with the essential yearning for life that the main character Charlie faces. His novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower quickly grew to be an iconic book in Young Adult literature, reaching out to both young readers and nostalgic adults. In 1999, Stephen Chbosky published a book which perfectly captures this essential yearning for life and the universal mix of emotions upon a teenager’s coming of age.
Most teenagers have at some point passively watched life dance alluringly before them, wishing for what seems to be the essential adolescent experience.
