Controversy and Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"

Contains Spoilers for Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky is a story told in first-person by Charlie, who writes letters to a stranger about his experiences because, “she said you listen and understand,” and he believes this stranger is a good person (Chbosky 2). Charlie is a shy, awkward freshman in high school and has already had to deal with the loss of a family member, his best friend’s suicide, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, and depression. As Charlie goes through his first year in high school, he also encounters drugs, smoking, alcohol, homophobia, underage sex, physical abuse, and abortion; all of these issues are listed by the American Library Association as common reasons for censorship. To top it all off, the language in Wallflower contains a generous amount of profanity.

Looking at the list of issues that are featured in this book, logically, one could understand why this book has been involved in multiple challenges to have it removed from city and school libraries. What a list of topics does not take into account, however, is how Chbosky handles the subjects and how teens have related to this book in the last two decades. In an interview with Chbosky regarding the film adaptation of his book, Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post describes the impact of The Perks of Being a Wallflower on young adults by saying, “Teenagers had written letters to Chbosky over the years after they had found something like salvation in the pages of his book.” According to a Variety article by Jonathan Bing, Wallflower printed 100,000 copies in its first 18 months of publication. Allison Lawrence, on Odyssey, said, “I believe this stuck with many of us readers. It allowed us to feel, to relate and to understand. It honestly didn’t matter who the letters were to. Just writing to ‘someone’ helped deal and sort through such a transitional time.” Additionally, though I did not read this book as a teenager, I can say that there are a couple of issues in the book that I dealt with in high school, and I would have appreciated knowing I wasn’t the only one.

The sense of realness and candor is truly Wallflower’s forte. Even though I was not exposed to drinking, smoking, or much to do with drugs at a young age, I feel like I can understand Charlie’s experiences because of the honest way he describes them. When describing his family’s Thanksgiving and his grandfather, he says, “My grandfather usually just complains about black people moving into the old neighborhood, and then my sister gets upset at him, and then my grandfather tells her that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she lives in the suburbs” (Chbosky 56). Chbosky uses a highly relatable event — a family gathering over a holiday — as the setting for describing the relationships between different family members. While the specific grievances between his mother’s family and his father, or between Charlie’s grandfather and his mother, may not be the same experiences the reader has had, by presenting them in the atmosphere of the family drama, Chbosky makes it something most teenage readers can understand.

While I disagree with the petitions to have this book removed from libraries, I don’t think this book is for every teenager, or even every adult. On his blog, author Pete Hautman said, “. . .there will always be a few fools who opt to try some of the crazy stuff they read about in books. Some of them will get hurt.” This is true, and there are also some who will read about Charlie’s experiences and cannot process it because they are still dealing with their own trauma. When I discussed this book with a coworker, she said, “I never could get into that book. It was too much.” For her, The Perks of Being a Wallflower presented too many topics that triggered her own past and she could not bear to relive the trauma for the sake of reading fiction. Though there are some who would choose not to read this book, they deserve the opportunity to make that choice.

Chbosky, Steven. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Gallery Books, 1999. 

Lawrence, Allison. “When Perks of Being a Wallflower Changed My Life.” Odyssey, 19 Apr. 2016, www.theodysseyonline.com/perks-wallflower-changed-life.  

Merry, Stephanie. “Stephen Chbosky Talks 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower'.” The Washington Post, 20 Sept. 2012, cbd917e6-019a-11e2-9367-4e1bafb958db_story.html.

Missing citation: Jonathan Bing, Variety