Blog Post #1

Roxane Gay’s I Was Once Miss America discusses the idyllic effect of a teen book series on her upbringing and how she struggled with being an outcast, contrary to the main characters in the teen book series. Gay’s diction and flow conveyed that she longed to be like Jessica or Elizabeth Wakefield, the most popular, gorgeous, perfect twins in Sweet Valley, while relating it to her far from perfect high school experience. Roxanne described how she so badly wanted to be a part of the popular group in school and idolized them so much that she even focused on the way they breathed the high school air. This type of exclusion Roxanne experienced accompanied by the perfect utopia that was Sweet Valley High further inhibited her to feel negatively about herself. These types of teen book series that fabricate such a utopia no longer are read as a just a story but contribute to the social pressures and expectations in today’s society. However, Roxanne was able to surpass this and relate to Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, even though she was nowhere close to their blonde and thin perfect physique. This type of literature coincided with public belief is also heavily exerted in many big cities and populated areas, ones that I am familiar with. Roxanne highlights her Haitian culture and how it contributed to her hardships in high school, being from a big city where appearance and reputation are everything, social media, books, and people can be quite influential and discriminative if you do not follow the cookie-cutter lifestyle. Roxanne later describes her vast excitement for the release of Sweet Valley Confidential and her repulsive reaction to the way the book was written in relation to the original series; this presents a growth in maturity levels within the author. Gay no longer looks up to the grown-up Wakefield twins like she did in high school but instead displays pity towards them, even though her love for the original series remains the same.