Last month, I saw Bo Burnham’s new film, Eighth Grade (2018). I’ve been a Bo fan for a long time, since his days on Youtube (when he was super problematic, something he has addressed himself), but I was still a little skeptical when reviews of the movie were saying that “Bo Burnham understands teenage girls.”
Like… great, another man being praised for telling a story about teenage girls, like a man would have any idea what it’s like.[1] But I was familiar with Bo, and he has talked a lot about how he’s embraced appealing to young people, and young girls in particular, and how he takes his responsibility as an entertainer seriously because of the impressionability of his audience. So I went in with an open mind, albeit still skeptical.
You guys… Bo Burnham has read my diary.
Middle school was hard for me, the way it is hard for everybody. Kayla’s experience wasn’t exactly like mine, but the feelings of loneliness and awkwardness and desperately wanting to fit in are painfully familiar. Burnham skillfully captured the unique experience of being a 13-year-old girl at a public school in the United States.[2]
Puberty, and that general time of being a teenager, is confusing. Your body changes, you feel new weird-ass feelings, and those feelings are intense and overwhelming. The benefit of hindsight and also reading a lot of young adult fiction and articles about child psychology has helped me reflect and understand, though I wish I knew then what I understand now.
And that’s why stories like Eighth Grade are important. They can be ways to tell young girls that they aren’t alone, that they’re absolutely right that being a teenager is hard, and that feeling whatever they’re feeling is normal and valid.[3]
After all… Did you feel like you knew what was going on when you were a teenager?
Shade, the Changing Girl by Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone is a surreal comic about an alien from the planet Meta named Loma who leaves her planet to possess a human body. She idolizes the poet Rac Shade and wants to go to Earth like he did and experience something new.
Unfortunately, she chooses a teenage girl’s body.
Loma’s attempts to navigate a human body as an alien are eerily familiar. She doesn’t quite understand her new “big” Earth feelings, and she certainly doesn’t understand her body. It’s hard enough to be a human teenager in a human teenager’s body—imagine what it would be like for an adult alien. The whole time I was reading this book, I was thinking, “Yup, that’s how it feels.” It feels like your body isn’t yours, like strange things are happening that you can’t explain. Your emotions are out of control and you feel a sort of madness.
Teenage relationships are difficult to navigate as well. As though just having a teenage body isn’t enough, Shade has possessed a bitch. Megan Boyer is a bully whose friends were glad she was in a coma and whose own parents hate her, and when Shade comes back to school, she has to figure out why everyone seems to hate her and build friendships with people that her host was once hellbent on destroying.
This book might have been interesting without the alien aspect—it could have been about a girl who wakes up from a coma with no memory and has to rediscover and reinvent herself—but the alien possession adds another layer of having to find one’s identity.
Loma is a fan of Rac Shade, who was the star of Shade, the Changing Man. I didn’t know this before I started reading, and I didn’t have to in order to read this book. But that adds another layer, too. Loma steps into Megan’s shoes and has to live her life, in her quest to live Rac’s life. Loma is unsatisfied with her life on Meta, but even on Earth, she isn’t really living a life of her own. She leans on her host, Rac Shade, and a character from a 1950s sitcom. She is still searching for her own identity.
She tries to be like Megan for a little while, but after getting in a fight with one of Megan’s old friends, she realizes that delving deeper into her host’s cruel feelings feels terrible. “The thing about having caused people pain is that it is painful,” Loma muses. “It makes me realize the harm I’ve done in my own life back on Meta.”
But she can’t get back home, so she apologizes to the people around her instead.
Even though people are skeptical of these apologies—that’s just how mean and manipulative Megan was—Loma already feels better and seems to have a better grasp on her own identity. “It takes so little effort to change the way feelings feel,” she says. “It is an antidote to the darkness in her… This warmth I’m flooded with are my own feelings, not hers.”
Loma establishes an identity and relationships of her own on Earth, and when Megan comes back to try to take her body back, Loma, who started out caring very little for anyone else, fights for her new life and her new friends.
Shade, the Changing Girl Vol. 1 is, at its heart, a coming-of-age story. It’s about adolescence and finding your identity and, well, changing. Loma is an adult on Meta, but she has to go through some changes, too. Everyone’s gotta grow up sometime.
Shade, the Changing Girl was published in 2017. Here is Cecil Castellucci’s website. Here is Marley Zarcone’s website. Shade, the Changing Girl Vol. 1: Earth Girl Made Easy and Vol. 2: Little Runaway are available for purchase. Support your local bookstore if you can, or visit your local library!
[^1] I say this as a John Green fan as well, though, so… I mean, I guess the secret is to treat female characters like women are people.
[^2] I saw the film with a friend of mine who grew up in a different culture, and she didn’t recognize much of the film in her own life. She said it was still interesting, though.
[^3] Which is why so many people are mad that Eighth Grade is rated R, thus keeping out the audience members who need to see it the most.
El's Reading Journal 