a response

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For John Green, the Battle Over Access to Books Has Gotten Personal [NYT]

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Dear Julie,

My novel, I’m the Girl, is loosely inspired by the Epstein case. It follows Georgia, a sixteen-year-old who is determined to escape poverty by securing a job at Aspera, an exclusive resort known for hiring beautiful young girls—“Aspera Girls”—to cater to its elite membership.

Georgia, a dreamer with big plans for herself, is determined to prove her worth and is aware of the limits her circumstances place on her future. She’s also aware that her body, which she repeatedly describes as “perfect” offers her the best chance of being hired, her only path to a better life.

On her way to the resort to plead her case, she discovers the dead and brutalized body of a 13-year-old girl, Ashley. After she teams up with Ashley’s older sister, Nora, to find and bring the killer to justice, Georgia becomes an Aspera Girl, thrown into a world of unconscionable privilege and wealth.

I’m the Girl is told through the perspective of a teenager groomed into believing her beauty affords her a level of sexual agency and control over the increasingly dangerous situations she finds herself in. Georgia is conditioned to enjoy the “power” she holds over the men she encounters to the point she is unable to recognize their abuses of her body.

This culminates in one of the novel’s most heartbreaking sequences, where Georgia’s consent is weaponized against her by her employer, Matthew, who has threatened to fire her for being impossible to resist. Before Matthew rapes Georgia, she assures him it’s okay because she likes girls. Georgia’s actions are not “voluntary” as you described, but coerced.

I’m the Girl demands the reader recognize what is happening to Georgia while also recognizing that Georgia will not because she cannot because this is how grooming works. Its success is predicated on the misogynist and patriarchal culture Georgia has grown up in—the same culture that upheld Epstein’s atrocities and silenced his victims for years.

I’m the Girl asks readers to expand their understanding of and complicity in that culture through the lens of one of its victims, and to in turn, extend back to those victims belief and support.

After Georgia is raped by Matthew, she has consensual sex with Nora. With Nora, Georgia is safe, loved, and respected. How she responds to and feels about their intimacy is Georgia’s first inkling of the difference, and by the end of the book she understands she’s been abused by a system she, a teenager, is helpless to fight.

But if, one day, she decides to—as many of Epstein’s survivors later did—it will depend on a single moment in her present where she is asked to choose to either accept the lack of value Aspera has placed on her body in exchange for all its offerings, or to reject it.

It is Nora’s support and belief that enables Georgia to reject Aspera, reclaim herself, and move toward healing. When one considers the scope of what she was up against, it’s not a small victory. It’s the kind of victory she can build upon, a new and better path.

I’ve spent fifteen years writing to the lived experiences of readers like Georgia, readers who do not have access to safe spaces or understanding and empathetic adults. I have also heard from readers like Georgia who have only felt that sense of safety and received that empathy and understanding in the pages of books. Those pages, they tell me, have empowered them to claim their own victories, to carve their own paths forward from the darkness to the light.

In a 2006 interview, Zadie Smith said fiction offers readers “a real education of the emotions [and] heart” through procedures that are “important to becoming a human being.” Beyond their potential as mirror and lifeline, books foster a deeper sense of empathy by giving us the opportunity to engage with and consider the value of perspectives unlike our own. To do so has always been a standing invitation to much greater rewards, and to a more enriched life.

In the wake of your statements at the Hamilton East Public Library board meeting on August 24th, I believe, Julie, you are entitled to the right to continue depriving yourself of that opportunity and those rewards. But you do not, and should not, have the right to deprive others.

It’s vital access to these books remain unimpeded for the reasons I’ve stated, and because, like John Green, I believe the relocation of my young adult books and those of my colleagues to the adult section of the HEPL contributes to the ongoing threats to our rights and freedoms as readers and writers.

My solidarity is with librarians, educators, advocates and allies in their continuing fight to protect them.

Sincerely,
Courtney Summers

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