Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Last night I burned my thumb on our oven. With my oven mitts on. I knew there was a reason I didn’t cook. Now there’s a tiny blister on the edge of my thumb that’s making it impossible to type.

Today is Bear and my 4-year anniversary. Who knew that missing an Arctic Monkeys concert in 2005 could be so fortuitous? The secret to our longevity? I will quote my Teddy Bear himself:

Come for the JJ, stay for the White-Harp.

Yes, everyone should adopt a stuffed baby harp seal into their home. They are the glue that holds relationships together.

Today is also the release date for three awesome books that I am dying to buy (but will most likely have to wait until I have more funds):

1. LEVIATHAN by Scott Westerfeld (STEAMPUNK. CROSS-DRESSING GIRLS. YES.)
2. ICE by Sarah Beth Durst (remember, this one has POLAR BEARS)
3. HUMMINGBIRDS by Joshua Gaylord (I heard him read from it last week at Kettle of Fish and HOLY COW IT’S AMAZING. Also, it is about an all-girls prep school.)

Anyhow, I did promise to review PAPER TOWNS, which I read a few weeks ago and then wept like a baby once I finished it. For the record, FTC, I bought it. In paperback. Because I am poor. Just letting you know.

Review of PAPER TOWNS by John Green

PAPER TOWNS by John Green

Quentin Jacobsen has been in love with Margo Roth Spiegelman ever since their parents moved into adjacent houses when they were children. Unfortunately Margo, with her six-syllable name and outrageous adventures, moves in a different social circle from Q, whose friends consist mostly of band geeks who like to play video games. So when she appears at his window one night dressed as a ninja to recruit him for a roaring revenge rampage, he can’t help but go along. They spend one magical night dancing under the stars at Sea World, and the next morning Q arrives at school to discover everything has changed—but not in the way he had hoped.

Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman? Where has she gone? Why has she disappeared? Why did she leave a trail of clues? The closer Quentin gets to solving them, the less he knows of Margo herself…

This is, without a doubt, Green’s finest work. Really. It’s even more sophisticated than his previous novels, and that’s saying something, considering how much I loved LOOKING FOR ALASKA. In PAPER TOWNS, Green once again produces a believable teenage male protagonist who is heartbreaking and endearing in just how real he is. Like his other novels, the synopsis of PAPER TOWNS does little justice to how deftly Green works with themes like identity, perception, expectations, and first love. Oh how I loved this book. Oh how I cried when I got to the end.

I’ve heard accusations that PAPER TOWNS is LOOKING FOR ALASKA all over again, except the names have been changed. I can see that: you could easily change the title of PAPER TOWNS to LOOKING FOR MARGO ROTH SPIEGELMAN and it would function just as well. There’s the well-intentioned Everyboy (Q/Pudge), the madcap pranks, but most importantly, there is the self-destructive, mysterious, alluring, crazy-but-incredible Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Alaska/Margo).

Okay, I’ll confess that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl annoys me. A lot. Like the Tortured, Brooding Hero, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has turned up so often in fiction she’s become a trope unto herself. She appears with normal or uptight male protagonists who just need a little dose of her “quirky unconventionality” to learn how to seize the day. She exists to broaden the boy’s world and change how he perceives life. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, like the Tortured Brooding Hero, hides a sweet and vulnerable core beneath a destructive exterior. She can be saved from herself, and the love of a good man can do it.

Saith Margo:

Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Margo Roth Spiegelman is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and while she fulfills every qualification of this trope, Green uses her to examine the idea and created perception of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The fact that she is Q’s fantasy girl and the fact that the more he comes to know her, the less sure he gets about who she really is, elevates Margo above her other fictional counterparts. Above Alaska Young, even.

One thing I respect about John Green is that while the MPDG turns up with astonishing regularity in his fiction, he never subscribes to that adolescent male fantasy that she will be saved. (Please see the movies Garden State and Elizabethtown.) The protagonist may want to save her, but ultimately he can’t. Green is even more frank about this in PAPER TOWNS than he was in LOOKING FOR ALASKA.

Saith Margo (again):

The truth is that whenever I went up to the top of the SunTrust Building—including that last time with you—I didn’t really look down and think about how everything was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. And here’s the thing about it. People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. And the worst thing is that I loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know?

Oof. Stab me where it hurts, John Green. I too, remember falling in love with the idea of being the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And I sort of was, for a time. I’ve been called mysterious, I’ve been called quirky, and I’ve most certainly been called unconventional. I wrote poetry on cigarettes, I wore silk top hats and men’s button-down shirts, I smudged my eyes with eyeliner, and wrote cryptic messages on the bodies of lovers before I slipped away in the grey half-light of dawn.

In the end, I became real. It isn’t that I don’t still wear silk top hats with men’s button-down shirts, but I stopped trying to be someone else’s paper cutout of a unique individual—or what I thought was someone else’s idea—and just became me. And I like who I am. I’m a reader, a writer, an artist, and a skydiving fanatic.

Recommended, recommended, recommended. I can’t stress that enough.

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