fangirl: a story for the fanficton girlies
- paigenherbooks
- Mar 3, 2024
- 5 min read
4/5
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is another book that I found in my adolescence and have loved ever since. It’s a story about a girl who just doesn’t quite fit in. About navigating grief in it’s many forms, about growing, learning, loving, and following your dreams. Just with all of Rowell’s novels you can’t help but fall for these characters fast and swiftly, yet are so content when the story is over to let them go. Fangirl is beautiful and poetic, it’s also witty and fun, it’s freeing and a coming of age story that I genuinely just really enjoyed and loved returning to.
Synopsis: A coming-of-age tale of fanfiction, family, and first love.
Upon going to college Cath is scared. She's got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend; a fiction-writing professor who thinks fanfiction is the end of the civilized world; a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words... and she can't stop worrying about her dad, who's loving and fragile and has never really been alone.
For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life?
Cather | Cath
I wanted to take a moment and dive into who Cath is and why she’s such an inspirational and profound character for me. Cath is just so relatable. She’s “weird”, she always has her nose in a book, she likes to write, stay inside, have dance parties on her bed, and wear comfy cardigans…she is also massively obsessed with Simon Snow, which as a fellow fangirl I can relate to this feeling of mass obsession on multiple levels. The things that make Cath so relatable are just so real, even her struggles are casted in this light that you can simply relate to. Getting a bad grade on something you put your whole heart into, falling in love for the first time, taking things slow with a boy (hahahahahaha) and so many more moments.
Cath feels crazy in the book.
Her dad struggles with some type of bi-polar disorder and Cath has anxiety as well. She is constantly thinking and hoping she isn’t crazy like her dad, not in a negative way, just in a “I’m a young girl and I feel absolutely fucking psycho every two to three business days” which I also totally relate to, and I think alot of women do. The feeling of insanity that has been intertwined within women is something I could spend hours and hours talking about, but I won’t hold you hostage for that long. I haven’t really read another story that showcases, in modernity, the feeling, that creeping, slow walking feeling of being insane. Of actually sitting there and thinking you deserve to be in a straight jacket. Reading Fangirl is so moving for that reason, here is this girl that feels, much like I do, and the people around her still love her, and care for her, that regardless of how hard she tries to push them away, they don’t leave. That set my standards for people and I’m blessed to be surrounded by those who don’t leave me when I’m having an episode, whatever that may look like.
Seeing these things, like mental illness within novels is so important. It’s important to let people know they aren’t alone and to showcase them in a way that is accessible and of course, relatable.
Speaking on mental illness, it is a subject that Rowell touches on with beauty within Fangirl. As I stated, Cath struggles with anxiety–the fear of others, interacting in new spaces. Her throat closes up and she can’t breath, hearing going in and out. Her father struggles with bi-polar, we see him manic, doing “well” and somewhere in between. Wren struggles with impulses and towards the end of the novel substance abuse. The tie between all of them is an event, and that is where the tragic beauty of the whole thing comes into play. How one event can affect people so, so differently. The just showcases the talent that Rainbow Rowell possesses, to be able to construct a story so heartfelt and moving, showcasing how mental illness, family relations, and grief can have a hold on people’s lives and how we move forward living with it.
The romance within Fangirl is also some of my favorite. Cath finds herself intertwined with one Levi, a lean, widow’s peaked, smiling boy who is just nothing but kind to her. The relationship that the two have doesn’t follow a lot of the romance book tropes, instead we see emotional connections building, a slow burn if you will (which are my favorite). I’m also such a big fan of men in books that treat women right, no “he’s mean to be because he likes me” bullshit. Instead Levi is nothing but kind, on his knee’s, supportive and there for Cath and it’s SO refreshing. The story follows Cath while she’s navigating this new time of starting college as well as sprinkling in these adorable and heartfelt moments with Levi, that you simply just can’t NOT adore this book. When he hits her with the "read to me, sweetheart" I melt.
Every. Single. Time.
Then, there’s the fanfiction. A large point of the book is that fact that Cath writes fanfiction for a fictional world, within the fictional world, Simon Snow. She’s working on this final installment for her thousands of followers, Carry On. Throughout this coming of age story we see Cath cling, very happily to Simon & Baz, the two main characters whom she has made to be in love. She enjoys nothing more than curling up and writing about them, and Rowell even gives the reader pages and pages of Simon and Baz content, straight from Cath herself.
I loved this but also didn’t.
The issue is with immersion.
While I’m reading the Fangirl story line, I am invested, in Levi, in Cath, in Wren, their dad, the plot. While Simon & Baz and Carry On is a large plot point, being sucked out of the Fangirl narrative and put into the Carry On one was jarring at times. It was also doubly jarring because then I would be invested in what Simon and Baz were doing and then was re-thrust back into the Fangirl plot line. This double vision per-se at times could just get to be a little much.
That being said, I did purchase Carry On and will be reading that immediately…
Fanfiction as a whole is something that just get’s absolutely shit on for no reason and I adore the fact that Rainbow Rowell gave Cath a voice to speak on this. Fanfiction is a type of writing and at times I would say is just as intensive and creative, compelling and thought provoking. Being able to manipulate and create stories out of a world and story that already exists, is in fact talent.
All The Young Dude’s is one of my favorites, it gave me a story, insight into the Marauders, and the plot line that I wanted, that I know for a fact J.K. Rowling will never give me. Being able to ease back into the Wizarding World with my favorite characters (Sirius & Remus) and be able to read a story about them, is something that I adore.
Fanfiction is just a different type of fiction.
Not to mention plenty and I mean PLENTY of fanfiction stories make it big. For example Manacled is getting published and that started out as Draco x Hermione fanfiction. Being able to read a story where fanfiction is something that the character is proud of, is something that is a part of her character and something, quite frankly she sticks up for, was so healing for me as a young teen and even today.
We have to stop being so pretentious about creativity, let people create.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is fun, it’s flirty, it’s deep, witty, chaotically beautiful and a perfect book for a young girl and for the girls who can never just like something a normal amount.
Guilty.
Shoutout to the women carrying queer canon fantasy stories on their backs, you’re the real one’s.
xoxo,
paige
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