Life’s Lessons from YA literature

I really wanted this book title to be It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.

Book fairs were always the shit at school. They would pass out the little flyers and you’d fantasize about all the books and posters and Dynomite!s you wanted, then sit around squirming waiting until it was your class’s turn to go down to the library.

All the girls would buy the same damn book, and it was usually by Lurlene McDaniel. It was always called something like Six Months to Live or Too Young to Die or Oh, Shit, It’s the Cancer. Once, I tried to get in on the trend and forked over my precious allowance for a copy. Girl has perfect life, girl is diagnosed with leukemia, girl’s world comes crashing down. Even as a 4^th grader I knew it was trite. I couldn’t even make it five pages past the diagnosis, so I don’t even know if those bitches died at the end or not. In addition to the kind of dialogue that takes place between retarded adults, the characters were totally unreal. If these girls were thirteen and getting ready to die, why did they just sit around and stare out windows clutching teddy bears and think about their families? Why didn’t they want to have sex or smoke cigarettes? Thanks to my mother’s Jackie Collins novels, these were the only things I had on my list of future goals.

So despite its major coverage in the Young Adult title section, I never bought into fear of getting some rare, life-threatening cancer diagnosis. No, the book that filled me with fear was The Baby-Sitters Club #3: The Truth About Stacey. The truth is that Stacey has diabetes! And diabetes means NO SUGAR! What kind of brutal, twisted plot line is that? To me, this was a fate far worse than death. I felt out of control, paranoid that I, too, would get the diabetes. I read that book so often the glue loosened and pages started falling out. I read through all the medical books I could find in the house to try to figure out how one could avoid such tragedy. When I learned it was mostly just an inherited defect, I considered the options. I finally decided that yes, the only option if I was diagnosed with diabetes would be suicide. By cake and Skittles. Because a life isn’t worth living without a constant flow of sugar through one’s veins.