Writing stories from their lives
Teens dish on hard subjects
Two years ago, Cambridge resident Eliza Appleton, a Buckingham Browne & Nichols student, wrote an essay about "dirty dancing," she notes with quote gestures. The essay peeled back the curtains on two Sweet Sixteen birthday parties, revealing thumping music, alcohol, and lots of physical contact on the dance floor. In so doing, it attracted attention from a number of media outlets and made its way into a book, "Red: Teenage Girls in America Write on What Fires Up Their Lives Today."
This Tuesday, Appleton, now 18 and a senior at BB&N, will read her essay at the Harvard Coop alongside a handful of other Boston-area teenage writers whose work was also published in "Red." The book came out in paperback in October.
Appleton is a little nervous about reading such personal details to a hometown crowd. "I'm going to try to limit it so that none of my school friends go," she said, mulling over the thought at a coffee shop in Harvard Square. "I'd feel more comfortable if I just didn't know that many people."
Appleton admits, though, that her reservations carry a whiff of irony.
"The attention has been a little overwhelming for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm an 18-year-old girl. I love attention," she said. "But there are times when I think I should have picked another topic, because it's a hard topic to talk about."
Hard topics, from sex to suicide, anxiety to anorexia, abound in "Red." Amy Goldwasser, an editor at large for Elle magazine, came up with the idea for the book while volunteering as a writing coach at a girls' club in New York City. Goldwasser e-mailed friends and colleagues who work with teens, asking for submissions for a possible anthology. She received 800 essays.
The book, as well as the readings and the book's website, has given teenage girls a forum for talking about subjects that might otherwise seem taboo.
"There are a lot more scandalous things going on than people like to think about," said Lexington teenager Caro Fink, another of the "Red" essayists. But these "are things that need to be talked about because they're things we deal with every day," Fink said. "To feel like you can't talk about it just makes you feel more isolated."
A slender blonde with black frame glasses, Fink was home for a recent weekend from New York City, where she attends Hofstra University. Her essay describes in stark detail how she cut herself with razor and scissor blades over a period of five years through middle and high school.
Fink also noted that reading her piece in front of strangers was much easier than doing so in front of friends.
"The time we read in SoHo, I had a good friend who lived in New York who came to see me, and I almost started crying when I was reading because he was looking at me with his big puppy dog eyes and - we know sign language - and he was like, 'I wanna give you a hug.' "
Goldwasser, who edited the essays for Plume, a Penguin imprint, was looking for writers who spoke vividly and intensely about life as an American teen, and noted the contributors' eagerness to share information.
"Their idea of privacy has completely flipped, in a way," Goldwasser said. "They are much more willing to go on national television and talk about their essays, even the really personal ones, than they are to read at their school library. I would say that it's the one aspect of being a teenager that is unrecognizable from when I was a teenager."
While publishing essays in "Red" has made professional writers out of all of the book's 58 contributors, the contributors are also busy juggling college applications or freshman courses as well as new friends and old flames. Fink, for example, is tackling her first college exams, but also working with Goldwasser on the possibility of helping to lead writing workshops for girls in Kenya.
Many of the girls also write an occasional blog post on the book's website about the events and ideas that sweep through their lives, documenting such intense and personal events as the death of a boyfriend or a sexual assault.
"I am so impressed with their courage" in writing about themselves, Goldwasser said. Many of the essays address subjects that become "the bomb that goes off in your real life when you have to go to school the next day. . . and yet they cut right to the chase and they're pretty fearless."
Eliza Appleton and five other writers will read from "Red" at 7 p.m. on Tuesday at the Harvard Coop Bookstore, 1400 Massachusetts Ave. 