I ended 2014 by reading two of the most talked about Young Adult books of the year, Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. The two books, while very different, are centered around faulty, constructed memories, denial, and the authors’ use of unreliable narrators.
The protagonists, Jam (Belzhar) and Candice (We Were Liars), have suffered what appear to be traumatic events. I entered both novels under the impression that something terrible has happened, but not quite sure what, and the protagonists aren’t exactly sure what actually happened either. Since both books are told from a first person point of view, the reader and the protagonists are both looking for the truth which makes for a strange experience as a reader. It almost turns into a race between the reader and the protagonist; who will find the truth first?
Quick plot overview:
Belzhar: Jam is mourning the death of her boyfriend and is sent to a boarding school for “fragile” teens. Jam is put into an English class focused on the works of Sylvia Plath (hence the title; The Bell Jar, Belzhar). The students are given journals to write in about the traumatic event they went through in order to help them heal. The journal turns out to be more than just a journal; they take the students back to a time before the trauma happened. In Jam’s case, she is able to spend time with her boyfriend before he died.
We Were Liars: Candice is trying to piece together what happened two summers ago on her family’s island that left her with memory loss and caused her cousins to stop speaking to her. As she goes back to the island, she finds out what actually has happened.
SPOILING THE ENDINGS HERE
The weird thing about these two books is the two different ways the protagonists deal with trauma.
The death of Jam’s boyfriend never actually happened. He wasn’t quite her boyfriend either. They kissed drunkingly at a party. When she found him kissing another girl, Jam declared him dead. It was easier for Jam to deal with him being dead than the thought that he might be with someone else. I suppose that he was dead to her. What Wolitzer is really exploring here is the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope. Although Jam’s lie seems just a tad irrational, don’t we do the same thing on a smaller scale all the time? We want to believe the version of the truth that is the best for us. In Jam’s case, that simply involved killing someone off in her mind.
Candice, however, brings the dead back to life. Her cousins were killed in a fire that she helped to set. Candice talks to her cousins throughout the book, goes to the beach with them, eats lunch with them. They are dead though. This lie seems more believable to me that Jam’s lie. The denial of death seems to be more realistic than the denial of life.
The brain is crazy. Denial is crazy. The truth should be easy to find, but these two books show that it is the opposite.
covertothetwentiethpower 