The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky
Summary
Charlie, an anxious, unusually perceptive ninth grader in a Pittsburgh suburb in the early 1990s, narrates his freshman year through a series of unsent letters to an anonymous friend, beginning shortly after the suicide of his only middle school friend. Taken in by seniors Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, Charlie is introduced to mix tapes, midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his first experiences with drugs and alcohol, and an unrequited crush on Sam that culminates, during a game of truth or dare, in a single kiss she gives him partly out of affection and partly, she tells him afterward, because she wants his first kiss to come from someone who loves him. Patrick's secret relationship with a closeted football player, and the violence that follows when it is discovered, runs alongside Charlie's own quieter unraveling, which comes to a head only near the book's end: buried memories surface of being sexually abused as a young child by his aunt, the aunt the family has spent the whole novel remembering fondly, and Charlie suffers a breakdown severe enough to require hospitalization. He recovers, and the novel's final letter finds him choosing, for the first time, to participate in his own life rather than only watch it, ending the letters that have carried the whole book.
It is plain, intimate, deliberately simple prose that reads quickly and sits close to Charlie's own limited understanding of what is happening to him, so a reader often recognizes the abuse and its aftermath before Charlie consciously can.
Historical Context & Significance
MTV Books, an imprint of Pocket Books, published The Perks of Being a Wallflower on February 1, 1999; no literary prize marked its arrival, and Chbosky, who drafted it in about ten weeks in the summer of 1996 and revised it through 1998, drew on his own adolescence for its closely observed detail. Reviews were mixed at the time: Publishers Weekly called it trite and Kirkus Reviews warned that sophisticated readers might object to its rip off of Salinger even while crediting its combination of realism and uplift, while Francisca Goldsmith in School Library Journal predicted it would engage teen readers for years.
That prediction outran the reviews. It ranked as the American Library Association's tenth most banned or challenged book of the 2000s and fourteenth of the 2010s over its sexual content and drug references, and its sales grew steadily rather than at once, from around one hundred thousand copies in print by 2000 to roughly one and a half million by late 2012, after Chbosky's own film adaptation, starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson and Ezra Miller, reached theaters that September.