Here’s the mystery of Annie on My Mind, the 1982 young adult novel by Nancy Garden: I’ve never met a straight person who’s read it. As far as I can tell, only queer women have read it—and yet I’ve never met one who sought it out on purpose. It comes to us only by accident.

I’m generalizing, I know. But test it out for yourself. Ask your favorite lesbian how she first encountered Annie on My Mind, and you may well hear something like this Amazon review from the year 2001: “Someone gave me this book when I was 17 and wondering who the heck I was. I read it in one sitting, flipped it over and read it again.” Or this one, from 2009: “I was walking down a [library] aisle and just had this funny feeling to pull out this book. Call it crazy, but it felt like the book that I’ve never seen before wanted me to read it.” As if by enchantment, the novel finds its way, often in disguise, to those who don’t know they need it.

It found its way to me in the summer of 2000, when I was thirteen, via the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble. Back then YA fiction took up just one small shelf, consisting mostly of Francesca Lia Block and the hoax diaries of Beatrice Sparks, so I was quick to notice a book I’d never seen before. The tagline intrigued me: “Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful … or so confusing.”

Why did I assume that Liza was in love with a boy, when the book gave no such indication? Its front cover depicted two girls holding hands, their eyes closed, their foreheads tenderly touching. Its back cover, which was a soft-butch shade of salmon pink, featured a short excerpt in which Liza’s mother asked, “Have you and Annie done more than the usual experimenting?” But these things have a way of hiding in plain sight from anyone not actively looking for them. We see what we expect to see. Annie was Liza’s best friend, I thought; the two of them were experimenting with boys. What else could they be doing?

The other possibility, of course, is that I did know. On some level, perhaps, I knew right away.

*

Case in point: if you don’t know what’s coming, the first seventy pages or so of Annie on My Mind are borderline unreadable. Their prose is Nancy Drew-ish (“Liza closed her eyes, absently running her hand through her short, already tousled brownish hair. Her shoulders were hunched tensely in a way that made her look, even when she stood up, shorter than the 5’3” she really was”). The narration makes confusing shifts between third person, first person, and epistolary. Worst of all, forty-three of those seventy pages—sixty percent of them!—are consumed with a mind-numbingly minor scandal at Liza’s high school involving amateur ear-piercing. If, for some reason, you want to hear your favorite lesbian groan with displeasure, remind her of this subplot.

The preliminary dullness feels perversely deliberate: the first third of the book is boring not because prep-school ear-piercing scandals are inherently boring (I would eagerly read an entire novel on the subject), but because it’s boring to Liza, who isn’t even directly connected to it. “It just seems ridiculous,” says one character, “to make a fuss about anything so silly,” and Liza agrees—yet the subplot keeps going and going, as if determined to lose all but the most committed readers. It reminds me of that viral tweet whose joke escaped me the first few times I saw it because it worked too well: “Ladies, what’s your makeup routine? I’m looking for a new foundation, preferably liquid but still matte and now that the men have stopped reading we riot at midnight.”

The midnight riot, in this case, is an Italian American public school girl named Annie. We first meet her, early in the novel, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Liza is drawn to “a wonderful voice,” like a sailor to a siren, in the otherwise deserted American wing, where the musically gifted Annie is singing to herself. “Don’t stop,” are Liza’s first words to her, followed shortly by “Do you come here often?” She doesn’t, so Liza gives Annie a guided tour of the museum, complete with a mock sword fight in the hall of arms and armor.

Despite this adorable meet-cute, it’s nearly a hundred pages before Liza even begins to examine her feelings for her new friend. Again, if you don’t know what’s coming, I don’t know how you make it through the first third of this book. I say this even as someone who did make it through—spellbound, no less—despite not knowing (not consciously, at least) what was coming. I no longer recall what I thought I was reading, where I thought it was going, why I endured the ear-piercing subplot in anticipation of whatever the turning point might be. I do remember that when it finally came, my eyes initially skipped over it—just as they skipped over “we riot at midnight” in that Twitter joke—because it, too, is hidden in plain sight, buried in the past progressive at the end of a long sentence:

Annie shivered.

Without thinking, I put my arm across her shoulders to warm her, and then before either of us knew what was happening, our arms were around each other and Annie’s soft and gentle mouth was kissing mine.

*

It’s true that I’ve never met a straight person who’s read this book—but I cannot discount the possibility that the book turns you gay. If any book could, it’s this one. There’s something Edenic about it, with Liza and Annie as the Adam and Eve of homosexuality, kissing “without thinking” and “before either of us knew what was happening.” Ignorant of gay culture, unacquainted (or so they believe) with any other gay people, they’re innocent of all knowledge except what they know in their hearts. “Annie, I think I love you,” Liza exclaims seconds after that first kiss (lesbians move fast), and in the narration she reflects, “The moment the words were out, I knew more than I’d ever known anything that they were true.” Naming their feelings as Adam named the animals, Liza and Annie invent love.

And what a love it is! To this day I’ve never read anything that rivals Annie on My Mind for sheer romantic gratification. The middle third of this book is like one big movie montage: Liza and Annie go on chaste dates to Coney Island (in wintertime!), the Cloisters, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Bronx-based New York Botanical Garden. They ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth. They dine at a fancy Italian restaurant in the West Village, where Liza has to be “convinced” to “try a wonderful pastry called cannoli, and after that we had espresso” (italics in original)—more like a wide-eyed country girl than the native New Yorker she really is. Their love renders them dazzled tourists in their own hometown; I’m reminded of the movie Enchanted, in which a fairy-tale princess is transported to modern-day New York City and, rather than being corrupted by it, makes it a sweeter, lovelier place simply by existing in it. Even the gruff museum guard melts when Liza and Annie stage their sword fight in the Met: “His eyes didn’t look angry. ‘Darn good fight,’ he grunted. ‘Ought to do Shakespeare in the Park, you two.’”

And how sure of each other they are! You never get the sense that the feelings are stronger on one side, or that either of them suffers under the strain of being so excessively adored by the other. So perfectly matched is their love, in fact, that they unknowingly buy each other the same Christmas gift: a gold ring with a gemstone (“pale blue” for Annie, “pale green” for Liza). Many of us might react to an unexpected ring exchange with anxiety or uncertainty—does it imply some sort of formal permanent commitment?—but not Liza and Annie:

Annie flung her arms around my neck and kissed me, even though there were four kids galloping down the snowy path from Clark Street to the Promenade, showering each other with snowballs.

“If you don’t put that ring on this minute, I’m going to take it back,” Annie whispered in my ear … She leaned back, looking at me, her hands still on my shoulders, her eyes shining softly at me and snow falling, melting, on her nose. “Buon Natale,” she whispered, “amore mio.”

“Merry Christmas, my love,” I answered.

Eventually they have sex—or, as they put it, become lovers—in a scene written in the prose equivalent of soft focus. I’m sure I’m not the only reader who studied the passage intently in the hope of understanding what, exactly, two girls do together:

I remember so much about that first time with Annie that I am numb with it, and breathless. I can feel Annie’s hands touching me again, gently, as if she were afraid I might break; I can feel her softness under my hands—I look down at my hands now and see them slightly curved, feel them become both strong and gentle as I felt them become for the first time then.

Nor, I imagine, am I the only reader who spent a lot of time experimentally curving her hands into the air, wondering what that part was for.

*

But I’m generalizing again. What I really mean to say, I suppose, is that the book turned me gay. If I wasn’t fully conscious of this on my first reading, or my second, or my third, or my ninth—well, at some point I had to admit to myself that straight girls probably don’t read Annie on My Mind ten times in a row. Throughout my eighth-grade year, to help me process their ongoing divorce, my parents were sending me weekly to a child psychologist on the Upper West Side; she was the first person I told. “I think,” I said, “I’m a lesbian.”

She frowned. “You’re too young to know that,” she replied. “Really, you’re too young even to be thinking about it. Keep it to yourself for now, all right? There’s no need to share this with anyone else.”

I felt foolish for having made such a major claim without proof. I decided not to tell anyone else until I found an Annie of my own—or, preferably, she found me. When that didn’t happen in the eighth grade, I waited for high school. When it didn’t happen in high school, I waited for college. And when it didn’t happen in college …

Here’s the heartbreaking paradox of Annie on My Mind: it awakens you to a very specific desire even as it forecloses you from it. If you’ve read about Liza and Annie, you can never have precisely what they have. You know too much. You can’t sit on a park bench with your pretty friend and then, innocently, without thinking, before either of you know what’s happening, just happen to find yourselves kissing each other—not when you have Liza and Annie on your mind. Their Eden is your fall.

*

Conflict arises in the final third of the novel when Liza and Annie are outed against their will. Scandal ensues at Liza’s school, where lesbianism is an infraction nearly on the level of unlicensed ear-piercing. Liza is made to feel ashamed of her sexuality, and for several months she refuses to speak to Annie.

This is by far the least erotic section of the novel, so I tended to skim it in my rereads. It was only while drafting this essay that I was struck by a scene in which Liza’s chemistry lab partner, “a very intense, brilliant girl named Zelda, who was going to be a doctor and who hardly ever smiled,” approaches her before class. Zelda says “in an odd, sort of choked voice, ‘If you’d like to talk about it any time, Liza, I’ll be glad to listen.” Liza tries to dodge the offer, but Zelda persists:

“Liza, may I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I said reluctantly.

“Well—I think you know me well enough to know this isn’t out of any prurient interest or anything, right?”

The icicles in my stomach got colder; I shrugged, feeling trapped.

“Well,” Zelda began, “since I’m going to be a doctor and all … I just wondered,” she said smoothly, “if you could tell me, from a scientific standpoint, of course, just what it is that two girls do in bed …”

The scene breaks there. Zelda has never heretofore appeared in the novel, and she’s never mentioned again; I had no memory of her character until this most recent reread. We’re meant to understand her as a dirty-minded homophobe, sharing with Liza’s religion teacher an inappropriate obsession with lesbian sex:

Ms. Baxter gave this incredibly lurid account of what she’d seen. It was awful. It made us sound like monsters, not like two people in love … It was as if everyone were assuming that love had nothing to do with any of this, that it was just “an indulgence of carnal appetites”—I think Ms. Baxter actually used those words … I wanted to stand up and shout … We love each other!

Ms. Baxter is a noxious bigot, of course, and Zelda is tactless. I can’t help thinking, though, that as a vindication against sexual shame, Annie on My Mind sets the bar rather high. What if Liza and Annie weren’t in love? What if, as Liza’s mother assumes, they really were just “experimenting”? What if you don’t have an Annie in your life but still desire, as Zelda does, to know what two girls do in bed?

I did eventually figure that one out. (Pro tip: dating women turns out to be much easier if you tell them you’re interested.) Of the women I’ve gone out with, most were nice enough, some were deeply disagreeable, and a few became lifelong friends—but none ended up being my Annie. When I finally fell in love, it was with a man; we’re happily married now, so the entirety of my lesbian experience could conceivably be rounded down to “an indulgence of carnal appetites.”

I don’t really think that way, or at least I try not to. But I still feel a certain ache when I think of Annie on My Mind and the purity of its romance. Sometimes I feel less like Liza than like Zelda—that unwelcome interloper in someone else’s story, with not Annie but sex on her mind.

*

Liza ultimately reconciles with Annie (who has no hard feelings, apparently, about being ghosted for months), and the novel ends with the implication that our heroines will be together forevermore. I’ve always struggled to suspend my disbelief for this happily-ever-after, so I was surprised to learn recently that it’s autobiographical. The 2007 reissue of the novel includes an interview with the author in which she recounts falling in love with her best friend, Sandy, in the fifties. “From high school on,” Garden says, “Sandy was the most important person in the world to me and the person I wanted to be with forever … And in 2004, because we live in Massachusetts, we were able to get legally married—after thirty-five years of living together.” They were still married at the time of Garden’s death in 2014. Serves me right: I never imagined that the true story could be more romantic than the novel.

That interview also solves another mystery, one I’d never considered before: Annie on My Mind was published in 1982, so what was it doing at Barnes & Noble in the year 2000? At the time I didn’t question what felt like fate, but it turns out the novel wasn’t just hiding in plain sight for eighteen years. In 1993 it made national news when a Kansas City school district not only banned it from libraries, but held an actual public book burning to destroy all donated copies. It wasn’t until 1999 that the book was returned to the libraries on the order of a federal judge.

I had no idea, when I first picked up that salmon-pink paperback, that I was touching such an inflammatory object. But I don’t think I’d have been shocked to learn that some adults feared it enough to burn it. That fear, that fire, was in the air in the summer of 2000—acrid enough that an eighth grader could sense it. It’s still in the air today. Fortunately, though, Garden’s Eden is always open to visitors: even after all these decades, Annie on My Mind has never gone out of print.

Annie on My Mind begins with a dedication: “For all of us.” I don’t know if Garden meant to include me in that category, but I believe her book really is for all of us—the lovestruck Lizas, the curious Zeldas, even the ones who haven’t thought about it yet. This Pride Month, I toast you all. Here’s to finding, if not your Annie, then at least a good book. Or, better yet, to the book finding you.

Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence than Weetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins:

The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood.

On the basis of that sentence alone—its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (“the reason was because”), its pandering parents-just-don’t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation—you’d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn’t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows:

They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.

Surprise! Weetzie Bat is not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It’s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet “my secret agent lover man” and pages later meets the love of her life—whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It’s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: “And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.” Weetzie isn’t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She’s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance.

This giddy excess, the sentences spilling over like triple-scoop ice cream cones, is the essence of the aesthetic that earned Block her rapturous cult following in the long nineties. By the year 2000, when I was thirteen and first discovering her, she had published a dozen books: Weetzie Bat and its four sequels, five stand-alone novels, and two short story collections. All of them were set in Los Angeles, focused on teenage girls, and written in prose that caused readers like me to lose their freaking minds. There were amateur websites where her fans swapped their favorite Block passages like songs or jewelry. My favorite Block fansite had a pastel-pink background with white text so tiny you had to squint to decipher the quotes on display:

A kiss about apple pie à la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs. (Weetzie Bat)

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. (I Was a Teenage Fairy)

My closet contained angora sweaters low-slung hiphuggers micro minis tummy baring midriffs fluffy chubbies platforms stilettos and sandals in black black black. Only black. Obsidian. (Violet & Claire)

It’s easy to compare this kind of language to poetry, but poetry is supposed to be savored slowly; Block’s prose is best consumed like handfuls of Skittles. It’s skimmable by design, meant to dazzle at a glance, and if her sentences don’t always make sense on closer inspection, well, neither does a Monet. Block’s style flattens magic into the everyday and imbues the everyday with magic, so that it can be difficult to remember which of her novels actually have magical elements in the plot. (Does Echo have mermaids? No, its narrator just vividly fantasizes about being one—with “tiny shells” for fingernails, and skin “like jade with light shining through it.”)

Block’s style is no less gorgeous for being so easy to imitate. You can break it down to parts: run-ons and fragments, food and flowers, fairy tale imagery and pop-cultural name-dropping, hyphenation and portmanteau, strings and strings of juxtaposed nouns. Who could resist trying to replicate it? In the summer of 2001 I went to nerd camp and read aloud an essay I’d written about growing up in New York City; afterward, a girl came up to me and asked, half-admiringly and half-accusingly, “Do you like Francesca Lia Block?”

Hell yeah! Why hide it? Block’s novels found me at an age when I was at high risk of believing it was cool to be bored by everything; in the nick of time, by the grace of luck, Block made it seem cool to be swooningly, squealingly excited about everything. With her words in my head, fruit tasted sweeter; music gave me chills; the teal-green gleam of traffic lights made me weep. I had never cared for movies before, but suddenly I wanted to see every film ever made and then make my own. I began taking photographs, and my best friend, who also loved Block, agreed to pose artistically nude for me. We got into a big fight over the resulting photos, which was my fault—but it was definitely Block’s fault that I wrote a short story about it afterward, and that it ended like this: “My heart is a crystal. My mind is a crystal, hard and clear and sharp-edged and so, so cold. I am smoke. A firefly.”

I had a crush on the world. That’s the Block aesthetic, really: a heart-doodling teen-girl crush on the world. It was a craving that Block’s books awakened and agitated but never quite sated: like candy, they were gratifying in the moment but always left me wanting. One summer night I succumbed to an urge to reread all of them in a binge and came away so frustrated I had to lie down on the living room floor, pressing my cheek against the rug lest I careen into space with yearning.

But what was it I wanted? A place, I thought, a physical place—Block made me want to live “where it was hot and cool, glam and slam, rich and trashy, devils and angels, Los Angeles” (Weetzie Bat). In a 2013 interview with The Toast, Block claimed that fans often told her, “I moved to LA because of your book,” and I don’t doubt it for a second. It was entirely because of Block that after high school I went to Los Angeles to study film.

I rarely talk about the two and a half years I lived in Los Angeles before dropping out of college. I may never tell the full story, which is gratuitously violent and doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. Sometimes I tell a self-deprecating version of it: I moved to Los Angeles because I thought it would be like a Francesca Lia Block novel, and I had a nervous breakdown because it wasn’t. But that’s not exactly true. In many ways my life in Los Angeles was true to Block’s vision: palm and lemon and avocado trees, tacos at Lucy’s, sunsets ablaze from smog, hikes to the Hollywood sign, houses smothered in bright twining blossoms. For a while I drove a lemon-yellow lemon of a car, a seventies Mercedes that ran on vegetable oil whose exhaust smelled like French fries. I had a pet cockatiel and a generic boyfriend. I felt so empty I wanted to die.

*

I don’t think I’m just projecting that emptiness onto Block’s work. There’s a certain hollowness at the center of her fiction that’s been observed even by her fans—most memorably by the writer Bennett Madison, who compares Weetzie Bat (with devastating accuracy) to “an outfit comprised entirely of lavish accessories and no pants.” Rather than hold this against Block, though, Madison blames himself for outgrowing her. The Block aesthetic, he argues, is calibrated to appeal to teenagers, and on this front it achieves “perfection.” “It’s me that changed,” he insists, “not the book.”

But that isn’t quite right. Even in the early 2000s, there were teenagers who picked up on that hollowness. I know this because I was one of them, and so was the creator of that pastel-pink fansite. At some point in my teen years I reached out to that girl, and in a long exchange of AOL emails we tried to figure out what was missing from the books we otherwise loved so much. I suggested that Weetzie Bat didn’t engage deeply enough with its genie premise, that it felt like cheating to have the heroine’s three wishes come true with no dark consequences whatsoever, and also that My Secret Agent Lover Man was a ridiculous name. My correspondent disagreed. That silliness was the whole point, she said (and she was right). There was something wrong with those books, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

We were talking around it; neither of us wanted to be the one to say it. In truth, we both knew perfectly well what bothered us about Block. It was the same thing that some of her fans loved most about her. It was the thing that launched so many of her other fansites, the ones that quoted passages like these:

I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. (The Hanged Man)

Have you ever had the sensation of losing flesh? You begin to feel the bones of your skeleton under your flesh. Bones of the shoulders. Bones of the rib cage. Bones of the hips. It is like finding a new being, one free of desire, free of time, almost…I hear horror stories about girls who don’t eat—how their hair turns white and their gums bleed. But I feel beautiful, perfect. I am all pale bone and bone-pale flesh and pale hair and I am light. I am like some fairy thing. I dream about fairies dancing around the house with their rib cages showing like baskets under their flesh. (The Hanged Man)

Her body is very thin. She believed that being thin might get them to leave her alone, but actually the reverse was true, it made them lavish more praises upon her. (I Was a Teenage Fairy)

The therapist they sent me to once said I need to forget about the faeries and realize that I am a real live girl, that I can’t live on ice and scraps; but I’m afraid if I become real, I’ll be like my mother—bloated and sad. I’d rather chew morsels and suck flowers and wear feathers. (Violet & Claire)

I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine … ninety-five … ninety-two … ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. (Echo)

And so forth. (Seriously, I could go on.) This aspect of Block’s work flew completely under the radar of adults: though the above novels were widely reviewed at the time of their publication, I have yet to find a single review that even mentions their fetishization of anorexia. Meanwhile, in the “pro-ana” LiveJournal communities of the early 2000s, Block was celebrated as an icon of “thinspiration.” Sick girls shared their favorite Block quotes alongside supermodel photos, self-starvation tips, and instructions for sticking a roll of quarters up your vagina before the doctor weighs you. In retrospect, this must surely rank among the most successful dog whistles in literary history.

I have too much faith in teenage girls, and not enough in the power of the written word, to hold Block responsible for her readers’ illness. After all, if it were that simple, she would have turned me anorexic, which I never have been. Still, when I reread her novels now, I find their obsession with thinness not just morally but aesthetically disappointing. It has a neurotic, blinkering effect—you wonder what her heroines might have the freedom to think about if they weren’t so fixated on their own bodies.

The same goes for the boyfriends: every Block novel features a straight male love interest so dull and undercooked it feels perverse, like a desperate distraction from something. My Secret Agent Lover Man has no personality outside his name. Cherokee Bat’s boyfriend, the mixed-race Raphael Chong Jah-Love (yeah, I know), has no personality outside his skin color, which is compared so frequently to various Hershey’s items it borders on product placement. Echo ends up with a guy who has no name, no dialogue, no characteristics at all beyond angel wings that may or may not be taped on (it’s ambiguous). Block’s prose can bamboozle you into believing that Los Angeles is paradise and anorexia is bliss—but when it comes to heterosexuality, it never manages to convince.

On the other hand, there’s Violet in Violet & Claire, seeing Marilyn Monroe on TV for the first time: “I just sat there with my hands stretched out trying to touch her. Why was she just electric static? I thought she’d be as warm and silky as she looked.” There’s Laurel in The Hanged Man, missing her best friend: “I think about Claudia’s curls—how I would hide in them the way I used to bury my face in flowers.” There’s Echo with her friend Nina: “We laughed, sipping the rice wine that seemed to shine in our throats. Nina kept leaning up against me, giggling, her hair getting in my face. I felt her breasts pressing … When we left the bar Nina leaned on me, hot skin and cold red silk.” And then, later, her friend Valentine: “I imagined her lying beside me under the antique wedding dress, her hair tickling my lips, her scent like all the pink and red flowers. I wanted to beg her but I didn’t say anything.”

But Violet and Claire, who obsess over each other to the point that a school bully calls them “dykes,” spend most of their novel fighting over a forgettable guy. Laurel and Claudia have an implied threesome with Laurel’s forgettable boyfriend, then never see each other again. Nina turns out to be a vampire, either metaphorically or literally (it’s ambiguous). Echo interprets her desire for Valentine as a desire to be Valentine: “Dreamed of kissing her lips, as if that might let me become who she was.” (We’ve all been there, Echo.) Echo ends her novel in mid-intercourse with that nameless, featureless man. “This is me becoming holy human and my own self,” she exults, unconvincingly.

Block’s fiction abounds with female beauty, with gay men and trans women and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them background lesbians, with earnest calls for tolerance and love—and yet the possibility of her heroine loving another girl seems never to enter her mind. Queerness comes off as a wonderful thing that has nothing to do with oneself or one’s own desire to kiss girls—a desire that’s nowhere and everywhere in these books, constantly rationalized into nothing (it’s friendship, it’s jealousy, it’s really about a boy) even as it keeps throbbing. It’s a paradox that’s distinctly of its era and painfully familiar to bisexual women of my generation, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of us grew up loving Block. If there’s such a thing as bi culture, then Block, with her plausible-deniability high-femme eroticism, is one of its patron goddesses—for better or for worse.

How strange, looking back, that these books opened our hearts to joy, only to slam shut and close in on themselves just when it mattered most. How dispiriting it feels to pause on the precipice of love—for women, for imperfect bodies, for oneself—only to shrink away into bad boyfriends and bones. How sad, in the end, to choose prettiness over beauty.

*

Block continues to publish young adult fiction to this day, and a Weetzie Bat movie is reportedly in the works. As far as I can tell, though, the cult of Block is not self-regenerating. It’s been well over a decade since I could find Weetzie Bat—let alone Violet & Claire, my old favorite—on a bookstore shelf (I always check). The well-stocked Iowa City Public Library carries almost no Block books. An informal survey of my grad school classmates suggests that even the most bookish women under the age of thirty are unfamiliar with the name Francesca Lia Block, unless they encountered it in the self-consciously nineties-nostalgic Rookie magazine. She remains widely beloved, analyzed, and interviewed—but mostly by her original generation of fans, now grown, still keeping the faith.

It pains me to see Block’s work reduced to a nineties fetish object along with Violet’s low-slung hip-huggers; it was always so much more than that. The rose-tinted nostalgia treatment can be as demeaning, in its own way, as a vicious takedown, and Block deserves neither. Like anything associated with teenage girls—like one’s own former teenage-girl self—she ought to be taken more seriously. She was an important author.

And to me, at least, she still is. Having just reread a dozen of her books to write this essay, I’m left just as ravenous and sugar-crashed as I was at age fourteen, just as ready to throw myself to the floor in frustration. I can’t stop needing her to be different, wanting her to be better, even as I’ll always be grateful for the beauty she showed me. I will never stop wishing for more from Francesca Lia Block. I love her, even now, the way I love the world.

Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Madeleine L’Engle (Photo: Sigrid Estrada / FSG)

The date December 16 is seared into my brain. Every time I see it on a calendar I snap to attention, thinking, just for a second, That’s the big day! This is a complete neurological accident. There is nothing significant about December 16, except that in 1996 I saw it on a flier in the lobby of my elementary school. The flier announced that Madeleine L’Engle, the Newbery-winning author of A Wrinkle in Time, would be visiting my school for a book-signing event.

Madeleine L’Engle. I was going to meet her.

I was nine years old, too young to keep a calendar or manage my own schedule or do much of anything except read. I stood in the crowded lobby and read the date over and over and over, burning it into myself so I’d never forget: December 16. December 16. Madeleine L’Engle is coming on December 16.

*

To me, she was so much more than the author of A Wrinkle in Time. In fact, I felt about A Wrinkle in Time the way Beach Boys superfans feel about “Surfin’ USA”: it was beginner stuff. I was a L’Engle completist, or as much of a completist as was possible for a nine year old in the pre-internet era. If a book of hers was still in print, I owned it and had read it multiple times. If it was out of print, like the underrated Prelude, I had borrowed it from the library. I had also borrowed an authorized children’s biography of L’Engle herself, so I knew she’d been a writer even as a child. That excited me. We were the same.

My family bought its first home computer for Christmas in 1995, and I quickly commandeered it for afternoon use, spending hours on end writing novels on ClarisWorks. Having managed, against all odds, to hang on to those files, I can report confidently that they are almost entirely plagiarized from Madeleine L’Engle. Often I am able to identify verbatim L’Engle phrasing: my heroine is always “pushing at her glasses in a characteristic gesture,” “lavishly buttering her roll,” disparaging her little sister as “twelve going on forty-two.” But beyond the wording, beyond the spelling of gray as grey, beyond the use of dashes to punctuate thoughts (—is that a quirk unique to L’Engle?) the real giveaway is my heroines. They are all, in one way or another, Vicky Austin.

The Vicky Austin books are not L’Engle’s best-known work. Unlike A Wrinkle in Time and its sci-fi sequels, the Vicky Austin books are domestic realism, though I use the term “realism” loosely. The Austins are a perfect family living in a rambling farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Their hobbies include saying grace, having family sing-alongs, reading aloud from Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets, and discussing the theological implications of an Einsteinian universe. Daddy is a country doctor; Mother is a gorgeous housewife who’s always cooking elaborate meals while playing Brahms on the phonograph. The four Austin children are all gifted in various ways, but Vicky, an aspiring poet who narrates the novels, is the most gifted of all. Adults love her to pieces. Here is a nonexhaustive list of things adults say to Vicky:

“You have an artistic temperament, Vicky … That’s empathy, and it’s something all artists are afflicted with.” —Vicky’s beloved Uncle Douglas, Meet the Austins

“I think the trouble is that you have too many talents … You’re on your way to being a real beauty, child, but it’s all in what’s behind your face. Right now everything’s promise.” —Uncle Douglas again, painting her portrait in The Moon by Night

“You are to be a light-bearer. You are to choose the light … You already have. I know that from your poems.” —Vicky’s minister grandfather, A Ring of Endless Light

“I said, ‘Maybe our intimacies are more precious if we know they may be taken away.’ Daddy looked at me and smiled and nodded slightly. Aunt Serena said, ‘You are wise, my child.’ ” —Troubling a Star

“I swore I’d never love or marry again. Your poem helped, Vicky.” —Some woman named Siri who learns to love again thanks to Vicky, Troubling a Star

Rereading the Austin books now, I’m struck by how often Vicky’s praise comes at the expense of another child, a lesser child. It’s not enough that, in Troubling a Star, Vicky’s poem wins second prize in a school contest; Aunt Serena must also point out that Vicky’s poem “was much better than the one that won first prize.” Vicky’s younger sister, Suzy, who is “thirteen, going on thirty,” is allegedly beautiful and smart and popular with boys, but she mostly functions as a straw man for the older characters to compare unfavorably to Vicky. “Suzy’s got plenty going for her, you’re right,” a sophisticated college boy concedes in A Ring of Endless Light (in which, to reiterate, Suzy is thirteen), “but it’s all out there, on the surface. I prefer to dig for gold.” Throughout the series, as far as I can tell, Vicky has no friends her own age.

How I longed to be adored like Vicky Austin! More than anything, I wanted Madeleine L’Engle to love me the way she loved Vicky—that is to say, the most.

*

And then it was December 16, and I was going to meet her. What would I wear? Not pants, that was for sure: in The Moon by Night, Vicky narrates cheerfully that “Daddy doesn’t like women in pants,” and neither did L’Engle, if her outfit descriptions were anything to go by. I squeezed myself into a pleated skirt, sweater, and tights. It was uncomfortable. But I wouldn’t let it show. In A Ring of Endless Light, as Vicky grieves for her dying grandfather, her mother reprimands her: “Don’t scowl. You’re getting lines in your forehead.”

To distract myself, I raided my leftover Halloween candy. Only the bad candy was left, so I ate an entire box of green Nerds. Then I looked in the mirror and saw, to my absolute horror, that my tongue was stained green.

My mother tried to reassure me. “She won’t notice,” she said. “You’re not going to stick your tongue out at her, are you?”

But that wasn’t the point. To meet Madeleine L’Engle, I needed to be perfect.

*

As an adult I find it hard to ignore the sinister authoritarianism of the Austin books. There is a violent undercurrent to the adoration of Vicky. In Meet the Austins, the Austins take in a recently orphaned ten year old named Maggy, and I don’t believe there exists in all of children’s literature a less sympathetic portrait of a child who has just lost her parents. Maggy is rude, disruptive, “spoiled rotten”; she is scolded for “bragging” about her parents’ deaths and for waking the household with her screaming night terrors. (L’Engle’s real-life adopted daughter, Maria, who came to live with L’Engle’s family after the sudden death of her own parents, was not a fan of Meet the Austins.)

Finally Maggy misbehaves one time too many and gets spanked. The spanking occurs offstage. This is how Vicky narrates it:

There’s a family story about me when I was Rob’s age or younger. I’d done something I shouldn’t have done, and I’d been spanked, and I climbed up onto Daddy’s lap that evening and twined my arms around his neck and said, “Daddy, why is it I’m so much nicer after I’ve been spanked?”

Well, Maggy was ever so much nicer for a long time after that.

In 1996, however, I did not find this chilling. The Austins seemed exquisitely literary, and I so wanted to be literary. That December, I was writing a novel about a fourteen-year-old aspiring poet who is precociously accepted into a writing class for adults, where she is immediately hailed by her teacher, the famous Virginia Percher, as the best writer of them all. “As I went home,” my heroine narrates, “I was flying. Virginia loved my work. Even the adults weren’t as good as me.”

This plotline is plagiarized from A House Like a Lotus, which is only an honorary Vicky Austin novel: L’Engle rewrote it, according to that biography I read, after deciding that it “didn’t fit Vicky’s personality.” The rewrite doesn’t appear to have been extensive. Vicky has become Polly; Dr. and Mrs. Austin are now Dr. and Mrs. O’Keefe; beloved Uncle Douglas is beloved Uncle Sandy; pretty younger sister Suzy is pretty younger cousin Kate, and so forth.

All the adults adore Polly, but A House Like a Lotus is specifically about the adoration of Polly by an aging heiress and artist named Max. In the first half of the novel, Max takes the sixteen-year-old Polly under her wing, painting her portrait and serving as an all-purpose mentor. Here are some of the things Max says to Polly:

“I’ll take you over Kate, any day.”

“You have elegant bones … Beautiful slender wrists and ankles, like princesses in fairy tales. Bet Cousin Kate envies them … What splendid eyes you have, like bits of fallen sky, and wide apart, always suggesting that you see things invisible to lesser mortals.”

“I love you, Polly, love you like my daughter. And you love me, too, in all your amazing innocence.”

Max is a lesbian. (This novel was where I learned the word lesbian.) Polly is uncomfortable with this, but her parents urge her not to think about it; the novel, which was published in 1984, initially looks like a rather clumsy call for tolerance. But then, at the halfway point, Max gets too drunk and reaches toward Polly and … does something to her:

She bent toward me, whispering, “Oh my little Polly, it’s all so short—no more than the blink of an eye. Why are you afraid of Max? Why?”

Her breath was heavy with whiskey. Her words were thick. I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do, how to stop her. How to make her be Max again.

In the next flash of lightning she stood up, and in the long satin gown she seemed seven feet tall, and she was swaying, so drunk she couldn’t walk. And then she fell…

I rolled out of the way. She reached for me, and she was sobbing.

The scene is written so vaguely that there’s no critical consensus on what exactly it is, how far it goes, whether it’s merely attempted or actually carried out. Whatever it is, Polly is so traumatized by it that she flees Max’s house, barefoot and sobbing, in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm. She has nightmares and flashbacks for months afterward. She doesn’t want to see or speak to Max ever again.

Here are some things adults say to Polly in the second half of the novel:

“Max is a dying woman. You can’t just drop her like a hot coal.”

“You have to allow even the people you most admire to be complex and contradictory like everybody else. The more interesting somebody is, the more complex.”

“The problem is, Polly, you made Max into a god. Can’t you let her be a little human?”

Eventually, Polly is worn down. She reminds herself that Max taught her everything she knows, that Max “saw potential in me that I hardly dared dream of.” She decides that Max must be “brilliant but flawed. Perhaps the greater the brilliance, the darker the flaw.” The novel ends with Polly calling Max on the phone to apologize for avoiding her. “Forgive me,” says Polly tearfully. “I love you, Max, I love you.”

As a child, I was disturbed by A House Like a Lotus, especially that ending, but I wasn’t sure why. I figured I would understand it when I was older. I pretended to love it.

In a 1963 New York Times article, explaining why she wrote for children, L’Engle remarked, “It’s often possible to make demands of a child that couldn’t be made of an adult.”

*

It was strange to go to school at night, and in a taxi with my father instead of on the bus. The book-signing took place in the elementary school gymnasium, noisier and more crowded than I’d ever seen it during the day; the event was open to the public and full of strangers. I carried two books for L’Engle to sign. One was my mother’s childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time, which embarrassed me—surely everybody would bring that one!—but my mother had insisted. To correct for this, I also brought Troubling a Star, my favorite L’Engle novel and no one else’s. I hoped it would communicate to L’Engle that I was a different caliber of reader.

The line to meet L’Engle was so long, and I was so short. I couldn’t see her until it was my turn—then I was face to face with her. She was older than I’d expected. Her gray hair was cropped shorter than in her author photo. In my memory she looms quite tall even while seated at the book-signing table; I’ve always assumed this was the exaggerated perception of a very small nine year old, but apparently she was indeed very tall.

She smiled an impersonal smile at me, the same smile she must have smiled at thousands of other kids. She wrote her name, nothing more, inside my books. She did not say, “Wow, Troubling a Star? That’s an unusual choice!” She did not say “You are to be a light-bearer” or “You see things invisible to lesser mortals” or “I love you, Frankie, love you like my daughter.” If she said anything at all, I don’t remember what it was. The whole thing was over so quickly.

*

According to the literary critic Dale Peck, great writers “write stories which become part of our dreams, but cult writers are themselves dreamed about.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamt about Madeleine L’Engle. In the summer of 1997, I discovered Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves, and that was it for me and L’Engle: I became a George completist and never looked back. Until I began to write this essay, I’d never revisited the Vicky Austin books.

It turns out that when I’m not studying them as if cramming for a test on how to be the most lovable child in the world, I can barely get through them. On top of everything else, they’re boring.

*

One more thing I remember about the night of December 16, 1996: After the signing, there was a Q&A in the school auditorium. This was my last chance to impress Madeleine L’Engle. I raised my hand and raised my hand and got ignored so many times that when she actually called on me, I was caught off guard.

My mind raced for a question that would convey that I, too, was a serious writer. I blurted out, “How long does it take to write a book?”

She replied, “A long book like A Wrinkle in Time takes about a year.” That was all she said. Then she called on the next kid.

I shrank in my seat, abashed. Hadn’t she given a longer, more thoughtful answer to everyone else? Why had she been so curt with me? Why didn’t she like me best?

But even more than that, I was dismayed by her answer. A year? I could hardly believe anything took so long. Maybe I didn’t want to be a writer after all. Who had that kind of time?

*

After I slogged through the Vicky Austin books, I reread A Wrinkle in Time. And if the Vicky Austin books put me to sleep, A Wrinkle in Time jolted me wide awake. I’d forgotten how much I loved Meg Murry, not because she’s better than everyone else—she isn’t; she’s ugly and argumentative and weak—but because she’s so real, so human, so fully herself. She’s lovable in a way that suggests that everyone else must be equally lovable in their own way, if you only got to know them.

A Wrinkle in Time is astonishing, irreducible. The plot remains indescribably bonkers, perhaps even more so for an adult reader, but it rockets along so swiftly on the force of its own dream logic that I read the whole thing in one breathless sitting. When it was over, tears were streaming down my face; I was crying the way you sometimes wake up crying from a dream. I wasn’t thinking about Madeleine L’Engle at all. I was thinking only of her book.

I wish I’d understood sooner that I didn’t need anything from L’Engle that she hadn’t already given me. I wish I’d just let myself love the book, instead of trying to make the book love me.

Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

This is an allegory, but it’s also true: I grew up in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood that was, at the time, the center of gay life in New York. We moved there in 1989, when I was two. I was one of the only children in my neighborhood. There was a park right across the street from my building, but only grown men hung out in it, and I wasn’t allowed to play there. I was enchanted by the rainbow flags that hung from windows in the summertime, but I couldn’t get any adult to tell me what they were for. “Brotherhood,” my preschool teacher told me, and then refused to answer any follow-up questions. In elementary school we had an art teacher who was openly living with AIDS, and every Christmas he had us decorate paper gift bags to donate to a meal service for AIDS patients. When he died, in 1996, I was nine years old and had still never heard the term gay. I was in middle school when I first began to encounter it, but only from classmates, and only as an insult. I was thirteen when I was finally deemed old enough to be told who in our family was openly gay. (My late grandfather, for one. Long story.) I told my ten-year-old brother and got in trouble for upsetting him; he was too young, I was chided, to handle such things.

Such was the cultural cognitive dissonance around homosexuality in the nineties. To say it was a transitional period does not begin to capture the weirdness of growing up internalizing the idea that gay people were deserving of rights, worthy of social acceptance, and outrageously inappropriate to discuss in front of children. This paradox is crystallized in the 1993 Seinfeld episode that gave us the catchphrase “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” That episode won a GLAAD award. So did the first season of Friends, in which every utterance of lesbian was met with uproarious canned laughter, as if the word itself were raunchy and daring—and it was, in 1995.

Gay people were, of course, nonexistent in children’s entertainment. In the nineties, the Scholastic industrial complex would sooner have published a bomb-building manual than include an openly gay character. But the paradigm shifted so rapidly in the mid-2000s that even I am occasionally tempted to judge the books of my childhood by the standards of subsequent decades—hence my long-held, largely irrational grudge against Ann M. Martin.

Ann M. Martin was the creator of the Baby-Sitters Club series, a blockbuster hit for Scholastic that ran from 1986 to 2000 and sold 176 million copies. There were hundreds of books in the series, all of which took place in a heterosexual hellscape of babies and boyfriends as far as the eye could see. This was the golden age of ghostwriting, and Martin was not the true author of the vast majority of the books, but her name and face and cutesy bio (“She likes ice cream, the beach, and I Love Lucy, and she hates to cook”) appeared on each one; she was as familiar as an aunt. When the news came out in 2016 that she was a lesbian, I was surprised by the uncomplicated rejoicing among my queer-woman cohort, and then surprised by the force of my own resentment. My knee-jerk reaction, I’m not proud to say, was: So what? What did she ever do for us?

Poor Ann M.! It wasn’t her fault, and it surely gave her no pleasure, that The Baby-Sitters Club was such an anodyne fantasy of straight childhood. How, in the nineties, could it possibly have been otherwise?

Except it almost was. It came close, once.

*

In 1997, a new Baby-Sitters Club spin-off called California Diaries began to appear on supermarket shelves. The crossover character was Dawn Schafer, and the occasion for the spin-off was her relocation from Connecticut to California. The cover art of this new series signaled forcefully that it would not contain babysitting. Rejecting the original BSC’s kiddy aesthetic of letter blocks and pastels, the California Diaries had matte covers with soft-focus photographs of gorgeous, unsmiling teens. They were plunging into pool water, or sprawling on disheveled bedsheets, or just gazing sadly into the distance. Sometimes, at first glance, they even appeared to be naked. In a word, they were sexy—a quality heretofore utterly alien to the BSC universe. The California Diaries clearly communicated, without having to say it explicitly, that they were for mature readers, those who had grown far too cool for the Baby-Sitters Club. I was ten years old, and I was instantly hooked.

I can only assume that Scholastic didn’t think it through, because the spin-off’s fundamental flaw was obvious from the start: with the original Baby-Sitters Club series still ongoing, the California Diaries could not violate the Groundhog Day timeline of the BSC universe, in which characters were not permitted to age past eighth grade. They got around this, sort of, with the belabored premise that Dawn and her California friends were transferred from their overcrowded middle school to a high school building, which placed them in tantalizing proximity to high schoolers. With the main characters permanently stunted at age thirteen, though, the potential for sexiness was limited. Alcohol was consumed, but never by the first-person narrator, who could only look on disapprovingly until the drinking was punished. Anorexia was suffered and cured within a single book. There was no problem that could not be solved by confiding in a trusted adult (except when Sunny Winslow’s mom died of cancer, but that wasn’t sexy). No one even kissed with tongue.

And amid all this edgy chastity there was Ducky McCrae, the only boy and only bona fide high schooler (a sophomore) in the core cast. He hung out with Dawn and her fellow eighth graders because his peers bullied him. You might expect this arrangement to generate some romantic tension, but Ducky’s relationship with the girls was purely platonic. He went shopping with them. He listened sympathetically to their virginal dating dilemmas and had none of his own.

It’s difficult to describe Ducky without sounding like I’m speaking in coy euphemisms, flapping my wrist suggestively, as if trying to talk over the heads of children: he was sensitive, if you know what I mean. He enjoyed fashion and Broadway musicals, if you know what I mean. He was just one of the girls, if you know what I mean. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Have you ever played Taboo? It’s a card-based party game in the tradition of Charades. You draw a card with a secret word on it (say, mustard), and you must convey this word to the group without uttering it or any of the related forbidden words on the card (yellow, condiment, spread, Dijon, hot dog). “It’s a … flavor agent … used on grilled meats … and a weaponized gas in World War I,” you sputter, until someone shouts “Mustard!” or time runs out.

Reading the California Diaries is like an endless game of Taboo in which the secret word is always gay and time always runs out. At the climax of Ducky: Diary One (book 5), Ducky is taunted by a male classmate: “You can’t change, can you? … I give you all these chances to be a NORMAL GUY, and what do you do? Act like a WIMP. Maybe that’s the way you ARE, huh? Maybe there’s a REASON you can’t meet girls! Maybe I’m wasting my breath and all these guys are RIGHT about you—” The bully is quickly cut off before he can specify what, exactly, “all these guys” are speculating.

The series liked to use wimp as a stand-in for the unsayable word. In Dawn: Diary Three (book 11), Ducky is the target once again, and the reaction makes no sense unless you mentally swap it out for a different word:

“You know what? You are a wimp,” Sunny said to Ducky … “No wonder your friends are a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls. Guys think you’re a dweeb, and girls your own age don’t even look twice at you.” … Ducky cast his eyes to the floor. For a moment, no one said a word … I was much more worried about the stricken look on Ducky’s face. I knew how he felt, or thought I did. He felt the way I would feel … if he had just insulted me in the most hurtful way he could think of.

It takes Ducky two entire books to forgive Sunny for the cruelty of her outburst. (I mean, she called him the w-slur!) By Ducky: Diary Three (book 15), he is reconciled with Sunny but troubled by his lack of attraction to her:

I’m not very good at guy things. And I just don’t get it. It’s like all the other guys have this book of rules that someone forgot to give me.

Or maybe I got the book, but some of the pages were left out.

Or maybe I got a different book? Is there more than one book of how to be a guy? …

What am I?

Am I a failed guy?

Suddenly, in the next paragraph, he seems to realize something he can’t quite articulate:

Wait a minute: Just because I’m not IN LOVE with Sunny doesn’t make me a failure. And there are plenty of guys who cook (aka RICH AND FAMOUS CHEFS) and like cool clothes (ROCK STARS, MOVIE GUYS).

Still, if I understood this whole guy thing, would I feel so freaked out about Sunny?

I work in a bookstore. Where on the shelves is the book on how to be a GUY???

Ducky: Diary Three came out in 2000, by which point I was thirteen and hyperattuned to all things Ducky McCrae. Reading about him felt like trying to hear my favorite song on a just-out-of-range radio station, waiting anxiously for the static to clear. I was beginning to suspect that the unspeakable g-word might apply to me, and I kept careful track of books that dared to deploy it. In the entire Animorphs series it appeared exactly twice. (Spin-off book Megamorphs 4, Tobias: “Was it really true that [this cultlike organization] didn’t care if you were young or old, male, female, black, white, Asian, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, straight, gay, rich, or poor?” Book 23, The Pretender, Tobias again: “Hard to imagine humans welcoming [Hork-Bajir aliens] into the local Boy Scout troop when they couldn’t even manage to tolerate some gay kid.”) A minimal gesture, but it rocked my world. It’s a major reason I remember Animorphs so fondly, and a major reason I soured on Ann M. Martin. If nerdy old Animorphs could say the word, was it too much to hope that the sexy California Diaries would go there?

It was. Ducky was never allowed to figure out why he wasn’t attracted to girls. Ducky: Diary Three is the final book in the series. The above-quoted “What am I?” reverie ends, unresolved, with Ducky at his bookstore job, staring curiously at a collection of poetry:

It’s a mix. Whitman. Adrienne Rich. And Baudelaire.

Maybe I’ll have to check them out sometime.

“Come on! Whitman!” I imagine the ghostwriters shouting in a last desperate attempt to win this unwinnable game of Taboo. “Fucking Adrienne Rich!” But that clue was too esoteric for me. Whom was it intended for? Whom was any of it intended for? If this thwarted coming-out narrative was meant as a coded reassurance for readers like me, it failed: for my thirteen-year-old self, Ducky McCrae never inspired hope or courage or anything but closeted despair.

On the other hand, he’s never left me. Every now and then I catch myself wondering what became of him, as if he were a real guy I used to know. I wish I could somehow liberate him from the California Diaries and replant him in a different book where you can say gay without breaking the laws of the universe. Perhaps some part of me will always be holding Ducky: Diary Three in my hands, studying the page where Ducky is studying the poetry book in his own hands, the two of us a recursive image of reading in the nineties, searching for something that can’t speak its name.

Author’s note: This essay owes its existence to Christy Admiraal’s podcast The California Diarists, on which I appeared as a guest in five episodes.

Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing.

What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?”

For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap.

But then there was Animorphs.

There’s a certain sound that certain millennials make whenever you mention Animorphs in front of them—a sharp inhalation, a soft “Oh!” No other series from that era elicits such a reaction. Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club are met with self-deprecating laughter and hyperbolic enthusiasm: “I must have read a thousand of those!” But for Animorphs we go quiet, we’re suddenly twelve years old again and we’re suppressing our excitement lest we be teased for caring too much. “Oh,” we say—a hushed confession—“I loved the Animorphs.”

Loving the Animorphs has never stopped being faintly embarrassing. The series ran from 1996 to 2001 and consisted of fifty-four books plus spin-offs, all credited to “K.A. Applegate” (in reality, they were written by the husband-and-wife team Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, with ghostwriters taking over after Book 25). Like Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club, the Animorphs books were a product of the Scholastic industrial complex, which meant that they looked like disposable crap. If you didn’t read them, it’s probably because you were repelled by their cheesy cover art. It was always a variation on the same theme: a human teenager “morphing,” thanks to primitive computer graphics, into an animal. By stages, a floppy-haired nineties white boy became a jaguar (Book 11); a pretty black girl became a butterfly (Book 19); a statuesque blonde became a giant squid (Book 27). If you flipped the pages quickly, you could make the transformation occur and un-occur via crude flip-book illustrations on the bottom right corner of every page. The entire series seemed to be merely a showcase for these software-generated images, which even then weren’t particularly impressive.

If you’d already judged the books by their covers, their premise was unlikely to change your mind. Even now I hesitate to explain it, because it just sounds so stupid: Earth has been invaded by alien slugs called “Yeerks” that slither into the human ear, take up permanent residence in the brain, and control the host’s body from within. No one on the planet is aware of this extraterrestrial threat except five teenagers—Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias—who have conveniently acquired the magical power (I mean, you know, “alien technology”) to transform into animals. Somehow, in between school and homework and trips to the mall, our heroes find time to wage battle against the Yeerks, a job involving frequent travel to the Amazon rainforest, the North Pole, the deep sea, outer space and, once, the Late Cretaceous period. Their secret is never discovered by anyone. Also, they have an alien sidekick named Ax, a blue centaur who’s obsessed with cinnamon buns.

Look, I know! I know how it sounds. And yet, against all odds, the books were great. They were dark and witty and thrilling, endlessly inventive and achingly sad. They made me laugh out loud and cry myself to sleep. I’ve been thinking about them for twenty years.

I’m not the only one. In recent years there’s been a steady trickle of belated critical attention to Animorphs. Those articles, this one included, bear the burden of proving that the series was not disposable crap—even though, yes, it looked like disposable crap and sounded like disposable crap and was made into an inexplicable live-action Nickelodeon TV show that was disposable crap. There’s something about this intellectual exercise that regresses us all to petulant twelve-year-olds at the supermarket, insisting to our skeptical parents that these books are not stupid, they’re educational and totally worth $3.99, please, please, please!

Consequently, today’s Animorphs apologias share a tendency to assert that the series wasn’t really about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens—that it was really about something else, though there’s no consensus on precisely what. Matt Crowley of the AV Club argues that the whole thing was a metaphor for puberty. Meghan Ball of Tor and Lindsey Weedston of The Mary Sue play up its feminist message. Tres Dean of Geek.com claims that Applegate was a “prophet” whose books anticipated 9/11 and the Iraq War. Many fans, including me, find a compelling transgender narrative in the character of Tobias, who chooses to remain in the body of a red-tailed hawk forever rather than continue living as a boy. In drafting this essay, I briefly considered making the argument that the series was really about the experience of being a child inappropriately entrusted with an adult secret.

None of these readings are wrong. But none of them feel exactly right to me, either—not as an explanation of what made the books great. I don’t think we loved them for their allegorical resonance. We loved them because they were exactly what they appeared to be: a series about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens.

It felt so real. No matter how preposterous the plots became, the writing always remained utterly true to the emotional and psychological reality of the characters’ situation. Each book opened with the narrating Animorph (a term the characters themselves disliked and used only with wincing irony) addressing the reader directly. “My name is Rachel,” they began, or “My name is Marco”—and then, apologetically, they explained that they couldn’t tell you their last name, or their exact age, or their location; it was too dangerous. They shouldn’t be writing this at all, really, but they were risking it because the fate of the world was at stake. The sense of urgency was palpable and convincing; it was a remarkably effective narrative technique. (Jean Guerrero of LitHub admits to believing, as a child, that the books were nonfiction.)

Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias exist in my memory as real people who endured unspeakable horror. I may not remember the details of the Animorphs’ trip to the rainforest, but I recall with absolute clarity the crushing dread suffered by Jake, the reluctant leader with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I don’t remember why Rachel had to morph into a giant squid, but I will never forget Rachel herself, the popular fashionista turned unstoppable killing machine—how much she loved the war, how deeply disturbed she was by her own newfound bloodlust, how her fellow Animorphs increasingly relied on her to do their dirty work even as they quietly speculated that she was a psychopath. (She’s the character who tends to get invoked nowadays as a feminist role model, a flattening oversimplification that I think does her a disservice.) I still can’t decide whether Cassie, the idealistic pacifist, was brave or naive for sympathizing with the Yeerks and occasionally trying to compromise with them. I still choke up when I think of Marco, who discovered that his mother’s body was possessed by the highest-ranking Yeerk and that he would have to kill her. (“I love you, Mom,” he whispered as he pushed her off the cliff. My heart!) I could talk about all of this forever.

But if you didn’t read them in the nineties, I have little hope of convincing you. The books are long out of print. You can dig up crumbling old copies here and there, but I doubt you’ll see past the sans serif font, the barrage of sub–Star Trek sci-fi babble (Kandrona rays, Gleet BioFilters, Z-space transponders), the cartoony onomatopoeias littering every page—hawk-Tobias screeching Tseeeer!, Yeerk laser blasters going TSEEEW! TSEEEW!, our heroes constantly screaming “AAAAHHH!” Can I really demand, in good conscience, that you read fifty-four of these? Even if you did, it wouldn’t replicate being twelve years old at the supermarket in 1998 and reveling in the sheer abundance of it all. These books were designed for that twelve-year-old, not for you. They were made to be disposable.

To be an Animorphs fan today is to witness for a cult religion that will never gain another convert. We live in a different world now, a world in which publishers pay a single author to write a handsome show horse of a hardcover once a year, rather than employing dozens of ghostwriters to crank out flimsy assembly-line paperbacks all day long. In such a world, Animorphs will always fall short of the aesthetic standard set by Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. This is unfair, since by many other standards it’s the superior series. It certainly deserves its own movie franchise. But as the Animorphs knew too well—as all twelve-year-olds know—life isn’t fair.

The mystery of Animorphs is not why it’s been forgotten, but how it managed to be so good in the first place. How did it happen that the Scholastic factory, grinding out book after book after book, squeezed out a diamond amidst the coal? What made Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias leap off the page and stay with us forever? I’m about to get a graduate degree in fiction and I still don’t know how that part works. I know it’s no likelier to happen in literary fiction than in science fiction, or children’s fiction, or fiction written very quickly for a faceless corporation. As far as I can tell, a novelist has very little control over the aliveness of her characters: either they spring to life on their own, or they don’t. I’m grateful to Applegate et al. for showing me that all you can do—all any writer can do—is write. The rest is alien technology.

Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here. 

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book, 1914

My micro-generation—that is, the subset of millennials who were born in the second term of the Reagan administration and graduated face first into the Great Recession, and of which the most famous member is probably Mark Zuckerberg—has very little to brag about, so you can hardly blame us for our possessive attachment to Harry Potter. Harry Potter is to us what the Beatles were to our baby boomer parents. To say that we “grew up along with Harry” is far too corny to convey the actual experience of being the world’s first children ever to read those books. I remember attending a classmate’s twelfth birthday party in 1998, thrusting into her hands a gift-wrapped copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (at the time the only Harry Potter book available in the United States), and informing her with something like personal pride, “This book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks!” It would probably still be there today if the Times hadn’t, shortly thereafter, created a separate best-seller list for children’s books on the grounds that J. K. Rowling’s success was unfair to the other novelists. It was a classic everybody-gets-a-trophy policy, a fitting legacy for the foundational text of millennial childhood.

The fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was published in the summer of 2003, by which point Harry was fifteen and those of us growing up along with him had discovered sex. The Harry Potter years also happened to coincide with the Wild West era of the internet and the rise of abstinence-only sex education; as a result, for better or for worse, erotic Harry Potter fan fiction played a major and under-discussed role in millennial sexual development. This was especially true if you were queer—or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were me—and had picked up on the secret gay love story that existed between the lines of Rowling’s text.

I refer, of course, to Sirius and Lupin.

A quick refresher: book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, introduces us to Sirius Black, the titular prisoner, on the lam after twelve years of incarceration for mass murder, and to Professor Remus Lupin, a wry, gentle schoolteacher carrying a terrible secret (he’s a werewolf). At the novel’s climax, the two of them come face to face and, much to Harry’s surprise, fall into each other’s arms. In an awkward info-dump of a monologue (the only structural flaw in what’s widely agreed to be the best book of the series), Lupin reveals that he and Sirius were very close friends in their school days—so close, indeed, that the brilliant young Sirius secretly taught himself to shape-shift into a large dog, just to keep his werewolf friend company during the full moon. It turns out (naturally) that Sirius was framed, and even after their twelve-year separation he and Lupin remain fiercely devoted to each other. By book 5, the two of them are living together in secret. Despite their outlaw status (Sirius is still a fugitive) and poverty (Lupin was fired from teaching after being outed as a werewolf), they begin to take on a quasi-parental role for the orphaned Harry. Then Sirius is killed in battle, Lupin is undone with grief, and so ends Order of the Phoenix and the tragedy of Sirius and Lupin.

I have exaggerated nothing: all this is directly stated in the text. You could be forgiven, though, for having blinked and missed the point in your own reading. Sirius and Lupin are minor characters, and everything we learn about them is filtered through the point of view of Harry, who is, like most kids, too self-involved to notice anything that doesn’t directly affect him. Queer kids, however, were directly affected by the suggestion of a gay love story happening in the background of Harry’s life—and so we noticed it. Oh, did we ever.

The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs. (Seriously, can you imagine?) But for much of that summer we simply studied Rowling’s text, searching, scrutinizing, noticing.

To put it another way: we invented close reading.

I’m not sure whether any of us understood this at the time, since it didn’t feel at all like schoolwork. It was pure pleasure; it was pure joy. One of the definitive works of scholarship to come out of the summer of 2003 was a 7,800-word essay titled “The Case for R/S,” posted on LiveJournal by a British schoolgirl writing under the name elwing_alcyone. “Current mood: jubilant,” the essay begins (opening with one’s “current mood” was LiveJournal house style, the equivalent of the MLA header), and then proceeds to track, cite, and analyze every mention of Sirius and Lupin in the entire series. At one point she counts the lines of text that appear between two phrases: “Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius” and “said Lupin quietly, looking away from Sirius at last.” The number is forty; Lupin stares at Sirius for forty lines’ worth of plot action. “JKR didn’t have to write that in,” she gushes. “I can’t think of any other examples of one character spending so many lines simply looking at another.” Current mood: jubilant, indeed.

It’s easy to forget how fully we trusted Rowling back then, how total her authority appeared when the series was still in progress and its ending known only to her. In those days, we were Talmudic scholars and she was God. “The Case for R/S” still holds up as a stunning achievement in Potterian exegesis, but what’s striking about it now is its unwavering faith in “JKR” and her control over her material.

Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius but who left for long periods to do mysterious work for the Order, helped them repair a grandfather clock …
OotP, p110, UK; p118, US

“Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius.” Not “Lupin, who was staying in the house to be closer to the Order,” or “Lupin, who was staying in the house because he had nowhere else to go,” or even just “Lupin, who was staying in the house.” He is staying in the house with Sirius.

JKR didn’t spend three years writing this book to shove in things that didn’t matter.

“Why?” elwing_alcyone writes at the conclusion of her essay. “Why has JKR left it so open-ended? She could have sunk this ship in a sentence. She didn’t, and now, the odds are that she won’t.”

Smash cut to the summer of 2005, when book 6 was released.

Hello, darkness, my old friend …

Those of us who were growing up along with Harry were by then college age—old enough, in other words, to put away childish things—so when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince unexpectedly paired off Lupin with a random woman, we were not only shattered but ashamed to be shattered. It was, after all, just a children’s book. Surely the whole Sirius/Lupin thing had only ever been a game to us; surely we had never believed it. Elwing_alcyone quietly appended an afterword to “The Case for R/S” acknowledging that, clearly, she had misread the entire series. Some of us tried to reassure her that Lupin’s sudden heterosexual romance didn’t contradict the possibility of an earlier romance with Sirius—after all, Lupin could be bisexual!—but no one’s heart was really in it. The straight romance was explicit in the text; the gay one was not and never would be. The author had spoken. The spell was broken.

To this day, I continue to ache over this in an unironic, unfunny way that I can’t quite explain even to myself. I was so sure. We were all so sure. How could Rowling have written those words and failed to notice what we noticed in them? This beautiful, delicate palimpsest that we’d read between the lines and so lovingly restored on our own—how could it be that it had never existed except in our heads? On some level I still don’t believe that we were wrong. If anything, it was Rowling who was wrong.

It doesn’t help that Rowling refuses to let the subject die. In 2007, after the series was officially complete, she announced that Dumbledore, of all characters, was actually gay the whole time; it just never came up in the books. In 2013, as if determined to add insult to injury, she wrote in a blog post that Lupin’s werewolf condition was, as we had always suspected, “a metaphor for … HIV and AIDS,” but also that he “had never fallen in love before” meeting his heterosexual wife in book 6. Come on, JKR, can’t we have anything?

Rowling is, like all her best characters, a gifted and flawed and profoundly silly human being—a fact that has become increasingly apparent in recent years. As a new generation of fans grapples with their complicated love for her imperfect work, I’ve noticed the phrase “death of the author,” coined in 1967 by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, invoked with surprising frequency in online discussions of Harry Potter. I doubt many Harry Potter fans are steeped in critical theory. Nonetheless, if you search the phrase “death of the author” on Tumblr (the social-networking site that has replaced LiveJournal in fandom circles), the site auto-suggests “J. K. Rowling” and “Harry Potter” as related search terms before displaying countless blog posts arguing that Rowling’s authorial intentions are irrelevant to her readers’ interpretation of her writing. It’s almost as if her fans have invented post-structuralism, just as we invented close reading—necessity, in both cases, being the mother thereof.

Nowadays, when I meet women my own age, I can guess within minutes whether they noticed Sirius and Lupin in the summer of 2003. There are certain signals we give off, certain coded questions one can ask. Often, upon identifying each other in the wild, we’re reduced to schoolgirlish squeals, lapsing into an ancient but well-remembered shorthand: “The forty-line stare!” “And the joint Christmas present!” “Together? I think so.” Such encounters are especially common with my fellow writers and academics—which is to say, those of us who have gone on to make a living in close reading.

Close reading is queer culture, always has been, so perhaps we would have gotten good at it regardless of Rowling. Still, I like to think that our fate was sealed in the summer of 2003. Of everything the Harry Potter books have given us, this might be the most precious gift of all, one that can never be taken away: the discovery that a text can contain more than the sum of its words, that a whole other story—a whole other world—may exist in the cracks and spaces between sentences, accessible to any reader paying the right kind of attention. It’s a form of magic. Even now, I’m jubilant.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.