The Anti-JK Rowling: Praise for TJ Klune
I am going to overshare. I do not apologise for this.
Way back in the mid 1990s, I was I young girl in school and I was badly suffering the years of harassment and abuse by my peers and also by the grown ups who should have cared for me. I was told I brought it on myself by being weird, I was told I was an attention seeker (yes, and can't you hear me cry for help?) and it was actually the lip curling disdain of the teachers that broke me the most.
I began to feel like maybe I did deserve it. I must have been so unpleasant, so hideous a person that others could see me for what I was and the universe itself was punishing me. I developed Body Dysmorphic Disorder, I kept checking mirrors to see if I could glimpse the monster, mocking myself whenever I thought I looked normal.
Anyway. It all came to a head in my third year, when I became admittedly a bit of an edgelord. I sucked in the darkness and screamed it out.
I was sent to a hospital school. This was a little tiny class of mixed ages for children who needed extra help. It was better here, I made friends - but I also learned a dark lesson here that no child should have to -
There is an appropriate face for trauma.
And I didn't have it. I was not the cute cancer kid. I was not the brave smiling little trooper. I was told by some of the staff in the hospital school that I didn't really belong there, I should consider myself lucky. One teacher said that those of us who were there for mental health issues were weak, we had failed. If we were braver we would be in a normal school.
I would have been 11 when the first Harry Potter book came out, though I didn't read any until sixth form college. I wanted to know what the fuss was about, a movie was being made.
I thought they were fun, as many did. But I can't pretend it didn't hammer an extra nail into my heart as it yet again told me that there was an acceptable face for trauma and it was not mine.
Harry Potter. He was written to be a good looking lad, sporty. Tragically dead parents that he didn't remember anything about. Suffered abuse, but it didn't break him in any inconvenient way. He was a tragically brave little hero with his friends the impossibly clever poster girl (who incidentally was very pretty when she wanted to be) and the token dweeb who appears to have mostly be written to prop up the other two.
Then we have Neville. His story was genuinely heartbreaking and yes it was addressed, but not really. His horrors are not something we talk about. Let's not go there, let's treat it like a dark embarrassing secret. But what a brave lad he is, standing up to his friends! Not for, you know, visiting his brain damaged parents and living with his abusive grandmother. No, no, it's the friends he stands up to. Brave silly Neville. Not the hero, of course. But isn't he brave?
And at last we come to TJ Klune. I read The House in the Cerulean Sea only recently. And wow. I laughed and cried in equal measure.
As with Harry Potter, we have a collection of magical youths, learning to navigate their powers as they grow. But the differences are diamond sharp, the focus instead on all the right things while still being joyful, fantastic and often hilarious.
How can this brilliant man get it so right in such a simple way? It's obvious, when you think about it.
All traumatised children matter.
There is no right face of trauma, least of all on a child, but hey let's not leave out the grown ups. At 40 years of age I thought I knew this, but I must have kept my younger self in a little cell in my mind (ahhh but she's different, she was a monster. We don't talk about her ...).
I was David. And I was Lucy. Why is it so much easier to forgive myself when I see myself as a yeti?
Children will lash out. Forgive yourself that. Children can be little weirdos, little balls of chaos and anger. That's okay. And no child's suffering should be ignored in favour of another, no matter what they look like or what they have done.
No child should be expected to be a poster boy hero, and no child should be chastised if they do not perform trauma right.
So yeah ... Thanks for reading until the end. And thanks to TJ Klune for making a 40 year old woman feel so many things, the strangest of all being forgiveness and acceptance of her 13 year old self.
Also, Chauncey is handsome as crap.
