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Love always, Charlie

By Anonymous
"Who is your favorite narrator?"

What a loaded question for a book-loving, story-telling junkie like myself. I've pondered long and hard about this question, and my answer seems to change a lot. A part of me wants to choose someone of high-brow literature, but that isn't me. And that's okay. I thought at first I would pick Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. I always come back to, "I am, I am, I am" when I get a dose of impostor syndrome (it happens a lot, grad school is hard ok). However, I am going to have to choose Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, my favorite novel of all time.

"Why?" my own mother asked, when I told her about this blog post. Well, I have many reasons for Charlie being my favorite narrator, and the first being that this book is home for me. My copy is a bit battered, dog-eared, and highlighted. This was the book that I turned to when my great-grandmother passed away from ovarian cancer. This was the book I turned to when I went through a bad breakup, or had fights with my parents, and it's a book I've gone to recently when my anxiety was at an all time high and panic attacks were becoming more and more frequent. Charlie, as a narrator, is so comforting to me. The novel is organized as a series of letters written from Charlie to an unnamed person. Each letter begins with, "Dear friend," and ends with "Love always, Charlie." I realize Charlie is a fictional character, but I feel like he understands me on a personal and emotionally intimate manner. Charlie as a narrator telling his story though his letters makes me feel as though I have a friendship with Charlie. The letters are to me, and me alone. As I'm typing this, I feel silly admitting that I consider this fictional, teenage boy narrator to be a real friend, ready to be taken down from my shelf in any time of need, but it is what it is. There's a passage that has always stuck with me when I am feeling anxious:

“Please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough. And I will always believe the same about you.”

That being said, Charlie will always unashamedly be my favorite narrator. And if anyone needs a fictional friend to run home to, I recommend Charlie. And to Stephen Chbosky, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for Charlie. 

Love always,
Allyson 



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