Ballads of Suburbia

Warning 1: This book should be read near a radio and a collection of 90’s cds and tapes.

Warning 2: This book SHOULD NOT be read in a fragile state of mind.

Warning 3: This book might induce drug-taking and self-injury in teenagers.

Warning 4: And, it might also induce purple-hairdying impulses in near-thirty-year-olds

“I have all these leftover insecurities from grade school, I guess”, I told my brother. “I automatically assume people won’t like me, so I don’t talk to them unless they approach me first. I can’t become part of a crowd because I can’t get past that feeling that I don’t belong”.

- Kara

I cried. A lot.

I read it in four busy days (a reading feat I hadn’t accomplished in a while).

And I—well, cried, and sighed, and cringed, and laughed, and was generally emotionally impacted.

Stephanie Kuehnert is good- really good- but this book surpasses even “I wanna be your Joey Ramone” (which I also loved, btw). This woman knows me- she knows my life- my tastes (the main character’s favourite singer is PJ Harvey)- she knows me.

But that’s the point, right? Even though “Ballads of Suburbia” tells the story of nine highschool punk kids in Chicago, it really tells the story of any teenager- especially those who were teens in the 90’s.

Through the music of my generation- and also my older sister’s generation- she tells the story of Kara, a shy and slightly awkward teenager whose life suddenly spins out of control. And I guess that is the point: Kara’s problems aren’t that big, but she feels them as huge, and the decisions she makes in order to escape those problems wind up driving her down a very familiar-looking path.

Nope, I was never into drugs like Kara ended up. But that isn’t the issue. It’s the silences, the escapism, the anger that Kara and her friends experience that is universal. In another time (and, perhaps, if I had stayed in my own suburb) I could have ended up like Kara. The first few chapters could have been written by me (and I’m guessing by lots of other kids), but then the story takes a turn into the “downward spiral” and goes from familiarly sad to shocking, scary and pathetic (did I mention this book is not for the weak hearted?).

Kara’s relationship to her little brother Liam reminds me so much of my relationship with my sister Angi that it is probably the one thing that impacted me the most about the book. How they got closer through music, how they fought, and trusted eachother, and took care of eachother. Kara’s need to protect Liam, and her clinging to memories of him as a little kid, and Liam’s dependence on her older sister. It got to the point that a certain fight scene with the remote made me have to stop reading.

While Liam is my favourite, all the characters in “Ballads” are memorable: Adrian, the adopted, promiscuous junkie; Quentin, his kind and equally addicted best friend; Christian, the hopeless romantic with a temper; Cassie, the girl with the crazy mom who tries to take care of everyone; Maya, the one with the dead mom, who can’t even talk about her problems; Stacey, the childhood friend gone slutty; Kara, the self-injurer writer; Liam, the abandoned little brother.

All these kids have problems, which are crystallized in a “Ballad” a là Johnny Cash: a story written by each one over the years in a spiral notebook, and headed by a quote from everyone from Tori Amos to Rancid. And while their problems really do suck, and really made me feel bad for them, they don’t in any way excuse the bad choices they make to escape them.

This is a good book, it goes into my favourites list, but I don’t think I would have recommended it to myself as a teen. Today, I can read it with nostalgia, empathy and relief—back then- and to my very malleable teenage brain- it might have just been a bad influence.