Tayari's Blog: Literary Flashbacks
Posted by TayariJones on June 24, 2009 09:15 AM
Filed under
News
I just got my contributor's copy of Shelf Discovery: The Teen 
Classics We Never Stopped Reading. This cool collection,grew from Lizzie Skurnick's "Fine Lines" column in Jezebel. In this column she revisited all her favorite teen reads as an adult. (My favorite was her look at My Sweet Audrina.)
Anyhoo, in Shelf Discovery, she has asked other grown up ladies to say why they loved the books they did when they were teenagers. I wrote about Forever, by Judy Blume. I thought about writing a plug for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. To this day it reamains one of my favorite books in the whole entire world. But Forever did a little something for me, if you know what I mean. Here's a quick excerpt from my essay.
When I was about eleven years old, my mother gave me The Talk. I am not exactly clear in my memory, but I believe that my father was in the room too. This was their idea of being enlightened parents—having a very sane and sober discussion with their on-the-brink-of-puberty daughter about sex, although they didn’t call it that. “Sexual intercourse” was the term they used and they explained it the way that you might explain the workings of a combustion engine. When they walked away, proud of themselves for being so much open their parents had been, I was somewhat underwhelmed. I understood how babies were made. I’d picked up a few extra bits of vocabulary like “ovary” and “spermatozoa”, but I had no idea why on earth people were having this sexual intercourse in the first place.
The gist of the essay is that I read Forever, and the whole sex thing made a little more sense.
![[divider]](http://www.tayarijones.com/images/divider.jpg)
There are 1 comments on "Literary Flashbacks". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.
Comment #1, by Patty ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry is one of MY all time favorites too! I often refer to it -- both in my American Lit classes and in my novel writing class...it is such a wonderful book. I used to teach it when I taught 5th and 6th grade -- and I use it as an example of how labeling books "YA" is foolish -- as that book might go unnoticed by lots of people because it is labeled YA but it is such a fantastic book -- beautiful writing, compelling story...all of it. I still have my dog-eared copy.
June 29, 2009 10:31 PM