Fangirl Themes

Families are challenging at the best of times, but when your mom abandons you on 9/11 and your dad thinks it might be a good idea to put a fireman's pole in the living room, you've got an extra-spe...

It's hard to get much more isolated than Cath unless you're stranded on a deserted island. And she's not exactly making a big SOS out of rocks for Google Earth to discover, either; instead she's we...

Cath's no stranger to idealized love in Fangirl. She can write gay magician boys all day long, and do it so well she becomes a wildly popular Simon Snow fanfic author, but when it comes to boy/girl...

In Fangirl, Cath is a freshman in college and still a virgin, and she feels like everyone around her is part of some secret club she'll never join. Her sister and roommate have had sex already (tho...

Let's face it: A lot of college students go wild their freshman year, and that wildness often involves booze. And in Fangirl, when Wren and her roommate Courtney discover tequila, it becomes their...

Growing up is tough for everybody, but if you're a girl without a mom to guide you, it's even tougher. High school's no amusement park (well, it is a little like a roller coaster that makes you bar...

When is fiction art, and when is it not? If you're writing about your own life, can it still be literature? What if you're writing about, as Wren calls Simon and Baz, "gay magicians," plucked from...

We all use our physical appearance to send a message. What we look like is a kind of shorthand, and we're walking personal ads, in a way, communicating our interests to people who might share them....