Review: Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli

Under what terms and conditions should people be allowed to come out? Is it fair that some people have an easier time than others? Those are the questions at the heart of Imogen, Obviously the latest novel from bestselling American author Becky Albertalli. 

Imogen is at her heart, a people pleaser. But is that the reason why, after her sister and best friend come out, she decides to up her ally game, joining her high school's LGBTQI+ club and becoming a bit part of the group? There, she makes friends with Gretchen, whose own coming out has been traumatic and eventually led her to changing schools. And when she discovers on a visit that her best friend Lili, who came out shortly before leaving for college, has lied to her new friends, not only claiming that she came out in high school but that Imogen is her ex-girlfriend, Imogen goes along with it. Then, just to complicate matters even more, Imogen finds herself falling for Tessa, a girl from Lili's college and she starts wondering is she really was heterosexual after all ...

While this novel remains light and loveable, it most definitely is not up there with some of the author's early novels. Rather than being a sweet coming out story like Simon Vs the Homo Sapien Agenda, or a novel about what it means to stand up for yourself and date who you want like The Upside of Unrequited, this feels more like a critique of queer spaces. Gretchen and the lack of acceptance that she directs toward Imogen feels very infuriating and one-dimensional, and the character is given little room to grow. The plot itself is fairly convoluted--it is difficult to believe that Imogen is that much of a people pleaser and that by the age of eighteen she has not learned to tell people to fuck off occasionally. Or that Imogen would assume that Gretchen was correct at all times, when she was surrounded by so many other supportive people.

I suspect that much of this novel was influenced by the author's own heartbreaking experiences of being forced to publicly come out before she was ready and not on her own terms and the discourse that surrounded those events. I can understand the impulse to write about it, however, I feel that she would have been better off developing this as a multi-character story that looked at the vastly different lives and experiences of LGBTQI+ teens in 21st century America.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more