bookgazing | 'Speak' - Laurie Halse Anderson

I’ve been wanting to read ‘Wintergirls’ by Laurie Halse Anderson since it came out, but to be honest I bumped ‘Speak’ off my reading pile. It sounded painful and the covers all make the main character look like a girl caught in a personalised pit of fire. I just did not think I was going to be able to handle it. What made me put it back on to my tbr pile? Uninformed people saying ignorant things (the original op-ed piece that referred to ‘Speak’ as pornography is no longer available, instead I’m linking to a School library journal post where Anderson talks about the controversy). Good work achieving your ignorant goal of keeping people away from this book people – oh, wait...

Over the summer break Melinda has become a high school outcast. Her friends won’t speak to her and neither will anyone else in the school. She’s picked on every day and she’s given up trying to communicate with anyone, including her parents. At the beginning of the new school year she ends up hanging out with a new girl called Heather, who uses Melinda because of her own friendless status, but Heather soon believes she’s going to be adopted by a popular clique and starts to break away from Melinda.

I had a quick Twitter confab with justaddbooks and BonjourCass as I was starting ‘Speak’ and one of them said they needed to take deep breaths and step back at some points during the book to be able to carry on reading. I can understand that, because the simplest passages in ‘Speak’ made my insides flip. It’s tough to explain just why this book is so powerful, because there are no explicit, violent images that show just how much pain Melinda is in. Melinda doesn’t present her pain by shouting and railing against the world, instead she plainly talks about her life and you get comfortable listening to her, liking her, empathising with her. Then she reveals something extra awful, in that same, normal, laid back narrative way (perhaps with a pinch more expressive emotional drama written in) and you suddenly realise you’re wholly unprepared to deal with what’s about to come. Maybe ‘Speak’ makes such an emotional connection because it shows how normal Melinda’s daily life is and quietly draws out the true awfulness at the centre of her normality.
The reader slowly learns why Melinda has been ostracised by her classmates and why she has stopped speaking much. She called the police at a party and people got arrested. She was raped at that party and no one knows. Melinda’s first and only full description of the rape just kills me with its simplicity, its brevity and it’s fast peak of rising emotion:

‘I open my mouth to breathe, to scream, and his hand covers it. In my head, my voice is as clear as a bell: “NO I DON’T WANT TO!” But I can’t spit it out. I’m trying to remember how we got on the ground and where the moon went and wham! Shirt up, shorts down, and the ground smells wet and dark and NO! – I’m not really here, I’m definitely back at Rachel’s, crimping my hair, gluing on fake nails, and he smells like beer and mean and he hurts me hurts me hurts me and gets up’

All the coping mechanisms that Melinda has put in place in order to deal with her life, like her snarky humour and her internal silence about the rape are gone for that moment. Readers have gotten used to these defensive cushions being in place, but now the reader is confronted with something so stark and obviously painful that they cannot hide from it, or choose to construe it in any other, less awful way. They just have to ride it out with Melinda, then deal with the fact that she won’t tell them anything else substantial about the attack for a long time.

The necessary emotional barriers that Melinda erects are also swept away in an earlier scene, which was one of the most painful moments of the book for me. Heather talks to Melinda about how being accepted by a clique means ‘now I have friends’. Melinda doesn’t care much for Heather, but she has helped Heather out and it’s hard to watch the defensive illusion that someone might like her being taken away:

‘I hide in the bathroom until I know Heather’s bus has left. The salt in my tears feels good when it stings my lips. I wash my face in the sink until there is nothing left of it, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. A slick nothing.’

As the book progresses Melinda’s life begins to have a few bright moments. Her art teacher sets a project which at first seems irrelevant to Melinda, but she becomes absorbed by her attempts to create and without sounding like a giant cliché (which the author avoids by never having Melinda verbalise a link between art and any growth in self confidence) I think the art project helps her to heal. She’s even able to reach out to an ex-friend during art class. Still her life is a continuously hard road right up until the end of the book. No one makes any allowances for what seems like Melinda’s bad attitude, or her failing grades, because they don’t know she’s been raped. Her parents are not exactly supportive, again because they don’t know what she’s going through. When Melinda discovers she’s great at basketball readers begin to imagine she might find empowerment through playing a team sport, but her bad academic performance, which is clearly a knock on effect of being assaulted, makes her ineligible for the team. ‘Speak’ was hard to keep reading because there is never any reprieve for Melinda, her life just kept staying awful and then got worse.

The harshness of Melinda’s situation is fully apparent when she reveals the rape to her ex-friend, Rachel. She writes it in a note book conversation which comes out plain and calm because of the distance writing provides. The reader knows it has cost her everything to write those few lines, but her ex friend flies into a rage and rejects what she’s said. If this was an adult book I’d have put it down because only bad things and accusations and running out of towns and unjust judicial process would have followed. I couldn’t have handled that for Melinda, ‘Speak’ had let me get too close to her personal voice. I’ve only just started thinking about what would surely come after Melinda begins to tell people about the rape, like the legal processes she’d have to go through and how likely it is her attacker would ever really be punished and...

‘Speak’ is a book very much locked in its own head space. I think that’s what makes it so hard to read without emotionally connecting with Melinda. Readers are always close to a first person narrator, but because Melinda speaks to absolutely no one else it feels as if you are her only confident. You can feel her pain all the time. And this book made me get angry because here is this character with all this spunk and snark and a bright mind, who can’t speak outside of her own head because someone else forced her to live inside herself. Every time she couldn’t bring herself to speak I just got so angry at the people in her world for not being able to see inside the soul of this amazing character (even though this is unreasonable – people are not psychics). It’s kind of amazing when you feel privileged to have been given the chance to connect so closely with a fictional character, who is not y’know real, but I feel like that’s what Laurie Halse Anderson has given me in Melinda, a character to care about as if she were a real person.

Um...so that was perhaps uncomfortably sentimental, yeah....*awkward cough*. See you next review.

Other Reviews

Hey Lady, Whatcha Reading
thingsmeanalot
The Zen Leaf
Medieval Bookworm