For a gawky, impulsive, twelve-year-old girl who badly wants to be seen as both beautiful and funny, there are few occasions more perilous than a school performance. The pivotal scene in “The Agony of Alice,” Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s 1985 novel about a sixth-grade girl on the unsteady cusp of puberty, takes place at a school pageant, in which the heroine, Alice McKinley, has been consigned to the unglamorous role of a bramble bush, a prickly backdrop to several crooning princesses. In a fit of onstage pique, Alice yanks the long, flowing hair of one princess—a rival student named Pamela—and derails the entire production. After the ruined pageant, Alice tearfully confides in Mrs. Plotkin, a teacher Alice had once dismissed as a “human pear” unworthy of pre-teen admiration. “Sometimes I think I’m growing backward,” Alice says, fearing that she’s lagging behind as her peers glide smoothly toward maturity. “We really don’t have any choice, Alice,” Mrs. Plotkin tells her. “We grow up whether we’re ready or not.”
In the past twenty-eight years, Naylor has written twenty-seven more books about Alice, tracking the strawberry-blond daydreamer from the slumber parties of elementary school (there are three prequels to “The Agony of Alice”) through the emotional gauntlet of high school. This week, Simon & Schuster published the series’ final installment, “Now I’ll Tell You Everything,” which follows Alice from ages eighteen to sixty. On its own, “The Agony of Alice” is a snapshot of adolescence—a year of small indignities and absurdities seen through the keen eyes of a distractible young girl. As a whole, the Alice series serves as a road map for growing up, a candid guide to the difficult situations and uncomfortable questions that arise during the transition to young adulthood.
“The Agony of Alice” begins as Alice, who lost her mother to leukemia at the age of four or five (the books have some inconsistencies), moves to Silver Spring, Maryland, with her father and older brother, Lester. Her father runs the kind of music shop that sells pads of paper that say “Chopin Liszt” instead of “Shopping List”; the mustachioed Lester wears a “Surf Naked” T-shirt and attends a local junior college. In this offbeat and male-dominated household, Alice yearns for a mother—somebody to sew her Halloween costumes and explain menstruation. This void is filled at first by Dad and Lester, Mrs. Plotkin, and Alice’s Aunt Sally, who buys her fussy dresses and scorns clothing with logos, because she is “a woman, not a billboard.” In later books, Alice seeks guidance from her three closest friends: prudish Elizabeth, focussed Gwen, and wild Pamela, her one-time pageant rival. But the maternal voice of the series belongs not to any character but to Naylor herself.
“Alice is the daughter I never had,” Naylor told me, speaking by phone from her home, in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s much easier to raise a daughter on paper than in real life.” Naylor, who also wrote the Newbery Medal-winning “Shiloh” and its sequels, is now eighty years old, with two sons and four grandchildren of her own. Although she was fifty when she wrote the first Alice book, Naylor has remarkably clear and charitable insight into the world of teen-age girls. Some of the best moments in the series come straight from her own childhood. In the first chapter of “Agony,” Alice recalls her attempt to reënact a kissing scene from an old Tarzan movie using the cardboard box from a Sears washing machine and her “stupid and good-looking” neighbor, Donald Sheavers. Naylor did the same thing when she was a girl. In a later book, Alice falls down the stairs at school and wets her pants, a double embarrassment that Naylor’s mother experienced when she was in high school. “What happened to women in 1914 still resonates in 2013,” Naylor said.
I was in elementary school in the nineteen-nineties when I discovered “The Agony of Alice,” a book that occupied the anxious years and sacred shelf space between Ramona Quimby and Jane Eyre. Alice was my companion; the rasp of her crisp new jeans—bought, with the help of a Gap saleswoman, after a mortifying encounter with a boy from school when Lester takes her into the men’s changing room—was as familiar to me as Harriet the Spy’s tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. For years, I imagined that my first kiss would come, like Alice’s, on a porch swing, with the taste of melted Whitman’s chocolate-covered cherries. I aged faster than she did, but, like the best characters from our childhood, Alice remained a beacon, a perpetual reference.
Throughout the series, Alice and her friends confront situations familiar to any fans of young-adult fiction or the CW network: breakups and crushes, menial summer jobs, tragic car accidents, awkward parental encounters. What distinguishes the Alice books is their treatment of sex. While physical intimacy is the source of endless concern in teen fiction, the nuances of sexuality are often elided, or ignored altogether. Naylor, by contrast, set out to demystify, in graphic and unembarrassed detail, a woman’s coming of age. In eighth grade, Alice discovers a Playboy in Pamela’s house; the girls read “Arabian Nights” and puzzle over the phrase “Nubian lasciviousness.” Upon learning that a friend is gay, Alice asks her father how he would feel if she were a lesbian. (He tells her he would be happy for her, but also sad, because she would face the difficulties of being a minority, and “wouldn’t know the happiness of having a husband and children.”) A seventeen-year-old Alice visits her long-term boyfriend Patrick (he’s the guy from the changing room at the Gap) at college, and they experiment with mutual masturbation on a park bench. When Alice first has sex, in the final book, there are no fireworks—just awkward angles and wasted K-Y jelly.
Naylor’s frank depiction of Alice’s maturation has landed a number of her books regular spots on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged books. (Between 2000 and 2009, the only books to receive more complaints were those of the Harry Potter series, for their “occult” content.) In 1997, libraries in a Minnesota school district removed “All But Alice,” the fourth book in the series, after the board objected to a scene in which a seventh-grade Alice discusses a rock song titled “My Necrophiliac Lover” with her father and brother. In 2002, the Webb City, Missouri, school library banned several Alice books for their “promotion of homosexuality” and discussion of issues “best left to parents.” When I asked Naylor about many parents’ continued reluctance to expose their children to literature that confronts adolescent sexuality, she repeated a line she first heard from Judy Blume: “What are you waiting for?”
Naylor has adapted her series in response to the real-life experiences of her devoted readers, girls and women who confide in her through letters, e-mails, and through Alice’s Web site, asking about unwanted pregnancies, discussing unhappy marriages, or confessing to suicidal thoughts (Naylor keeps a list of suicide-prevention hotlines by her desk). “I figure that if I don’t address the things that women and girls write to me about, then the Alice girls are failing,” she told me. “I’m not a doctor. I’m just an enlightened grandmother. I reflect their feelings back to them.”
Perhaps better than any author besides Blume, the patron saint of disruptive young-adult fiction, Naylor understands that what makes sex—like school performances—so fraught for young women is the abiding spectre of social shame. Rather than use that shame as an occasion for moral lessons about how girls should behave, Naylor has treated it as an unfortunate reality against which to struggle. That this remains a somewhat radical concept in modern America has secured the Alice series an important place on the bookshelves of young women.
The Alice series has enjoyed continued success in recent years: there are two and a half million copies in print today. In 2007, a movie adaptation called “Alice Upside Down” was released, starring Alyson Stoner as Alice, Penny Marshall as Mrs. Plotkin, and the former “Beverly Hills, 90210” heartthrob Luke Perry as Alice’s father, which I choose to interpret as a nod toward Alice’s first generation of admirers. Several years ago, a fan wrote to Naylor with a pressing concern: Who would finish Alice’s story if Naylor passed away? Naylor, who had committed herself to twenty-eight Alice installments, wrote a draft of the final book and locked it in a fireproof box in her office, with instructions to send it to her publisher if she died. Last year, Naylor’s husband of more than fifty years, Rex, who was the first reader of all her books, passed away. With Alice heading off to the University of Maryland and on the brink of adulthood, Naylor felt it was time to let her fictional daughter go.
I read all five hundred pages of “Now I’ll Tell You Everything” in one sitting, in my childhood bedroom. Life moves quickly, Alice observes: one moment, she’s getting “sexiled” by her college roommate, and the next thing you know she’s chauffeuring her kids to dental appointments. Amidst new embarrassments and dilemmas, Naylor pauses to reflect on some truths of adulthood: that “simple” weddings are seldom simple, that routines can be joyful, that our lives progress alongside the shadow of other possibilities—the men we didn’t marry, the jobs we didn’t get, the friends we stopped calling. In adulthood, Alice’s agonies are less mortifying, but the stakes are higher.
Near the end of the final book, Alice—now a middle-school guidance counselor—gets a call from the livid mother of a student, blaming Alice’s sex-ed “agenda” for the “degradation of America.” “What a shame we can’t have a responsible dialogue,” Alice later says, with tears in her eyes. She knows parents worry about risqué clothing, child molestation, and sexual violence in the movies. “But,” she says, “we can’t deal with problems if we pretend they’re not there, as well as normal sexual feelings that arise naturally in adolescent youngsters.” Sex ed doesn’t have to be just about preventing disaster, she says; it can also teach respect and love. Having catalogued her own sex education through the years, Alice now sees her mission in broader terms. “Was I in this battle now, heart and soul?” she asks herself. “Absolutely.”
Rebecca Davis O’Brien is a reporter at The Record, in Bergen County, New Jersey.
