A wallflower is a person who watches as other people live their lives, never participating in their own. They might have a story worth sharing but no idea how to tell it. Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower takes the aspects of the background character and brings them to the foreground in the form of Charlie, a teenager who is learning how to transform himself into the main character of his own life. What better time to start than the first day of high school?

        Perks is an epistolary novel, unfolding in a series of letters that Charlies addresses to an unnamed “friend.” The reader can easily fill this role, although this proves to be a difficult job. Charlie immediately distances himself when he reveals that he cannot put his full trust into the recipient of the letters: “I will call people by different names, or generic names, because I don’t want you to find me.” The reason for his secrecy reveals itself as we learn that Charlie is coping with the recent death of his best friend, while still processing the death of his Aunt Helen. Finally ready to speak up about his grief, Charlie finds himself in desperate need of someone to listen.

        He soon learns that true friends not only listen, but they must also know when to speak up. Patrick and Sam, step-siblings who adopt Charlie into their friend group, seem to live life on their own terms, an attitude that Charlie admires. He clings onto his new friends, who spend their free time putting on the Rocky Horror Picture Show and dreaming of life after high school. However, Charlie’s compliant nature lends himself to become an object in several of his friends’ narratives, and the only person who can see that Charlie is in trouble is the person on the other side of his letters, who has unwittingly become a wallflower themself.

        Perks tackles the extremes of adolescence, ranging from the trivial struggles of high school to more serious issues of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Charlie’s friends are not quirky for the sake of originality, but for the sake of survival. They live within the fantasy of a teenage vacuum, attempting to understand their identities before the vacuum implodes and they are forced to grow up. Chbosky shatters this illusion by leading his young characters to acknowledge that there is no vacuum; there is nothing to prevent the traumas they have experienced from following them into adulthood. They must choose either to confront the ghosts of their past, or stay haunted forever.

        Although Charlie has begun to come out of his shell throughout Perks, he still has a lot of growing up to do. When he stops writing his letters, we can only wonder whether or not he manages to hold onto the “infinite” feeling he has discovered by living on his own terms. Nothing about being a teenager is infinite, however, and Chbosky knows that we know this truth, for he taught us how to listen.