I discovered Nancy Garden’s ‘Annie on My Mind‘ recently and decided to read it today.
Liza is in the final year of high school. She wants to study architecture when she goes to college. One day she is at the museum exploring around, when she hears someone singing. She stumbles into this girl whose name is Annie and they end up talking. Before long they become friends and then magic happens. If that is all there is to it, then there is not much, isn’t it? Two people meet and fall in love and live happily everafter – what is the fun in that? Where is the drama? Well, this is the late ’70s or the early ’80s. If two young women fall in love and people discover that, all hell will break loose. And it does. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.
‘Annie on My Mind’ was published in 1982, exactly forty years back. It was probably one of the first lesbian stories told in YA fiction. It was much ahead of its time. In that era, if a person comes out, they might get expelled from high school. They’ll definitely lose their jobs, and it will be impossible to get another one. Parents, who might be liberal in principle, will definitely have a problem if their own child comes out as gay, and will try to change their child, give them hell, or hide that fact from others. Nancy Garden captures all this beautifully in her book. I was worried about how the story was going to end, and what might happen to the main characters – things didn’t look good, it was a conservative time, after all. I’m not going to tell you what happened. You have to read the book and find out.
One of my favourite coming out stories is this one. One of my friends who was straight when she was in high school, came out gay when she graduated from college. At some point she wanted to tell her dad about it. She thought a lot about it and she was worried how he’ll react to it. But after hesitating for a while, one day she invited her dad for lunch, telling him that she wanted to talk to him about something important. While having lunch, after the initial chitchat, her dad asked her what it was that she wanted to discuss and after hesitating a bit, she told him that she was gay. Her dad said, “Oh that! I already knew that, of course! It is so cool! You are so cool! So how is your day? What did you do today morning?” And just like that, all the tension she had felt disappeared. Her dad, with just those simple gestures and words, told her that he loved her unconditionally. When my friend told us this story, we screamed and said, “Your dad is so cool! We want to meet him!”
I’m sharing some of my favourite passages from the book below.
“I’m not sure how to describe Annie’s voice, or if anyone really could, except maybe a music critic. It’s a low soprano—mezzo-soprano is its technical name—and it’s a little husky—not gravelly husky, but rich—and, according to my mother, it’s one hundred percent on pitch all the time. It’s also almost perfectly in control; when Annie wants to fill a room with her voice, she can, but she can also make it as soft as a whisper, a whisper you can always hear.”
“There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.”
“I went downstairs to Dad’s encyclopedia and looked up HOMOSEXUALITY, but that didn’t tell me much about any of the things I felt. What struck me most, though, was that, in that whole long article, the word “love” wasn’t used even once. That made me mad; it was as if whoever wrote the article didn’t know that gay people actually love each other. The encyclopedia writers ought to talk to me, I thought as I went back to bed; I could tell them something about love.”
I loved ‘Annie on My Mind’. It is a beautiful book. Have you read ‘Annie on My Mind’? What do you think about it?
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