Dispatches from the 80s #1
Lois Lowry's Anastasia Again!
“The suburbs!” said Anastasia. “We’re moving to the suburbs?" I can’t believe that you would actually do such a thing to me. I’m going to kill myself. As soon as I finish this chocolate pudding, I’m going to jump out the window.”
—Anastasia Again!, by Lois Lowry
Oh my good lord, talk about books that I can’t imagine being published now. They’ve gotten challenged quite a lot over the years—the above quote being one of the reasons, and it’s literally the first paragraph in the book—and there’s also mild profanity in some, as well as references to Playboy and X-rated movies and so on. Oh, and in this one, flashers figure in.
If I’m remembering right, some adults were also really upset that Anastasia’s father lets her have his beer foam?
Anyway.
I picked it up yesterday for the first time in forever—I just checked, and I wrote about the first one over 15 years ago—and I’ve been howling over it. Like, full-on guffaws every couple of paragraphs. I’ve also been reading a ton of it aloud to Josh, whether he wants me to or not. (I suspect NOT, because even though it’s making him laugh, too, he’s trying to re-read The Hotel New Hampshire and it’s maybe a LITTLE distracting to be constantly switching gears between John Irving and a wonderfully pretentious, infinitely over-dramatic twelve-year-old.)
“I was unpacking the records,” he said, “and I can’t find the Verdi Requiem. I think the movers stole it.”
“Dad,” said Anastasia patiently. “Those movers never even heard of the Verdi Requiem. Those movers were the sort of people who would only steal Peter Frampton.”
—Anastasia Again!, by Lois Lowry
In Anastasia Krupnik, she’s grappling with a difficult teacher at school and the fact that she’s not going to be an only child for much longer, and she uses a notebook of Things I Love and Things I Hate lists to process it all.
In Anastasia Again!, her family moves from Cambridge to the suburbs, and she starts to get to know the people in her new neighborhood while also realizing that her friends’ lives are going to go on without her in Cambridge—and that hers is going to go on without them. She realizes that her assumptions about the suburbs and the people who live there are maybe not entirely true, and she realizes that while she misses things about her old life, there’s a lot to love about her new life, too.
Her notebook is still in use, but instead of lists, she processes everything through her attempts to write a mystery novel—in which she plans to feature, among other things, explicit sex:
Agatha Christie books had hints of love affairs, but nothing explicit. Anastasia wanted her mystery novel to be even more interesting than Agatha Christie’s.
(She also dings the Nancy Drew books for lack of realism, which includes, in her opinion, Ned Nickerson’s lack of interest in sex. Which, hoo boy, I wonder what she’d have thought of that Nancy Drew show on the CW.)
Her parents continue to be delightful, doing things like squabbling about one of Myron’s old girlfriends—who, if my memory serves, shows up in a later installment—and largely continuing to talk to their kids like they’re small adults while also trying to gently correct/teach. Here’s her father, both trying to push back on Anastasia describing her 2-year-old brother’s verbal precocity as “weird,” while also managing Sam’s toddler-ness:
“I was just pointing out that different aspects of people develop at different rates. Now in many ways, Sam is still a baby. Cut that out, Sam.”
Sam was eating toothpaste.
“I like it,” said Sam. “I like the flavor.”
“Well, it costs a dollar fifty-nine a tube. Cut it out.”
He began to dry Sam with a big, blue towel.
“See what I mean, Anastasia? He’s mischievous, like all toddlers. And he still wears diapers because he hasn’t achieved the physical maturity to be toilet trained. I wish you would be toilet trained, Sam.”
“No,” said Sam, and smiled sweetly.
Moving is depicted, even for her parents, as being bittersweet—they very much WANT to move, and they very much LOVE their new house, but Lowry shows moments in which they’re clearly nostalgic for their old apartment. Which is such a lovely, nuanced way to think about moving—that even when it’s a good, happy move, there will be usually be a part of you that’s sad.
If only she had paid more attention to the Cosmopolitan article on being a spritely conversationalist. It had had a section about Phone Flirtation. Not that she cared.
—Anastasia Again!, by Lois Lowry
Anastasia is so bright, so ridiculously opinionated, and so hugely, endlessly talkative with people she’s comfortable around—mostly her family and adults in general—but the moment she’s around her peers, she gets excruciatingly embarrassed and neurotic. Even just THINKING about how to make conversation basically gives her hives. At the same time, she’s in denial about how much she cares, particularly in regards to Robert Giannini, a classmate of hers in Cambridge who brings a briefcase to school and wears—THE HORROR—rubbers over his shoes when it’s raining.
Sound at all familiar? Because it does to me—this is all basically just a description of what I was like at twelve. At least on the inside.
In addition to being CONSTANTLY embarrassed and worried about EVERYTHING, she has a tendency to let those worries spin out into daydreams:
She could feel the thought of it affecting her physically. The stomachache was coming back. She could feel her hair beginning to ooze oil, so she would have to wash it again before she went to bed, and she had already washed it that morning. She could feel a pimple beginning to grow on her chin. Her eyes, behind her glasses, began to blur. Terrific. Now she was going blind on top of everything else.
Anastasia pictured herself in the suburbs: seven feet tall, with acne and greasy hair, and blind. She would get a Seeing Eye dog, a ferocious one, and name him Fang. If any boys ever made any remarks to her about her height, she would simply say in a low voice to Fang, “Kill.”
Given that it originally pubbed in 1981, it’s probably not surprising to hear that some of it hasn’t aged well—the r-word shows up a few times, and a few others that we don’t use any more. In almost all cases, said words aren’t used with hateful intent, but they’re still there, and worth mentioning.
Talk soon,
Leila
OKay, time for an honest disclosure. Despite talking ABOUT these books by type - and READING about these books, I never actually FINISHED any of the Anastasia books (or a lot of books about certain types of female characters from the late 70's - 80's). I read from authors adjacent to this time period in grad school, and I read criticism of Lowry in texts, but as an Actual Child (TM) in the 80's, I couldn't read these.
There was a certain type of story, whether TV or written literature that I couldn't stomach as a child/tween, and those were of the confident twelve-year-old who speaks to adults and has a knowing air about her. Most of my friends were adults, but it seemed like the adults who made up these characters were... mocking them? I was always horribly afraid of using a word wrong, and adults seemed to think that was cute. They loved to listen to me talk with my "SAT words." (Had I taken the SAT at twelve? No. Did I know what that was? No.) Somehow these characters seemed like a bizarre, made-up thing that only existed with big-city white kids, as created by adults. Ironically, these were also the types of books people gave to me most often as a gift - because they were trying to tell me something.
I missed that, when I was a kid, of course.
Now it's just kind of horrifying. I'm still afraid to read these.
These were my very favorite as a kid, and I read them over and over. Everyone in the house could tell I was reading them because of the howls of laughter coming from my bedroom. I still have them but of course it's been a while since I read them. As usual, you are making me want to pick them up again!