No Kidding (Book Review)

Myrna Kostash No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987) Kostash’s account rests on many interviews and many statistics. It’s a good, if often depressing, read. The anecdotes and stories give meaning to the statistics, which haven’t changed much in the last 25 years. She’s very good at giving us both sketches and portraits of the girls. She has the story-teller’s gifts of pacing, selecting the telling detail, and the illuminating quote. These gifts also, of course, mean she’s very good at shaping the narrative to suit her purposes. She’s a persuasive writer, and never more so than when she seems to be just telling a story.
     Kostash is a natural-born reporter, which means that she focusses on the unusual and the painful. I don’t doubt the truth of what she reports (insofar as a report is an honest account of the reporter’s perceptions and experience, it’s true). But I do doubt the impression that for most teenage girls, most of the time, life is more or less awful. My own observation is that teenagers are pretty resilient. Or maybe just short-term amnesic. Their time-horizon is short, their social perception ends a few inches outside their skin, they can empathise deeply and yet be blithely unable to imagine a  point of view different than their own.
     On the other hand, some of the people (groups) she identifies are in great need of help, support, and compassion. Far too many teenagers (not just girls) grow up dysfunctional in families whose members don’t or can’t treat each other as human beings. It’s not easy to figure out reforms that could ease the burden of abuse, but I think among them there must be changes in the environment within which teenagers try to navigate. That is, the environment must make some choices easier and other choices harder. A couple of small ones: make it more expensive to buy sugar drinks, and cheaper to buy fruit. Eliminate bells in schools (we did this for over ten years at the school I taught, and we had less tardiness than when we had bells).
     This book is often heart-breaking, occasionally funny, and sometimes hopeful. Recommended. ***
     Disclosure: Kostash was a student in a freshman English class I taught at the University of Alberta.