Fangirl

Content Warning: This section contains a discussion of teen alcohol abuse and alcohol poisoning.

Going to college is a time of transition from childhood to adulthood. As Cath and Wren navigate their first semester of college, they have vastly different approaches to exploring their identity as they come of age. Because of their mother’s desertion 10 years ago, change makes Cath nervous and upset; she wants things to stay as they have been. Wren wants so badly to escape the trauma of their youth that she overcorrects, binge drinking and dramatically restricting her diet.

Both Cath and Wren had to grow up before their time after their mother left when they were eight. In the wake of her abandonment, they both exhibited symptoms of extreme trauma: Wren stole “Simon Snow pencils and Lip Smackers and a Britney Spears CD” and “cut some other girl’s dress with safety scissors,” while Cath “wet her pants during Social Studies because she was scared to raise her hand to ask for a bathroom pass” (144). Due to his mental health conditions, their father often could not appropriately care for them. Cath and Wren saw it as their responsibility to recognize the signs when their father needed medical intervention and blamed themselves when they missed them. At the age of eight, they became caretakers to their father, rather than the other way around. Cath learned to make breakfast and Wren learned to make dinner because “it was either cook or hope that [their father] remembered to pick up Happy Meals on the way home from work” (233). During this time, their primary avenue of support was one another. Having to co-parent their father and support themselves, they never got to experience their childhoods or build their own identities.

This co-dependence influences the twins in different ways. Cath wants to “melt down” at the idea of not having Wren by her side constantly. She perceives any distance between the twins as Wren making her “do this alone” (7), while Wren wants college “to be an adventure” where they both “mee[t] new people” (6). However, while Cath escapes the pressures of coming into adulthood by spending time in the World of Mages with Simon and Baz in her fanfiction, Wren uses her newfound freedom to sneak into bars and drink to the point of “blackout” every weekend for multiple days in a row. Both are attempting to escape their past and the pressures of developing independent identities in different ways.

While their father hopes Wren will “self-correct. That she’[ll] get it out of her system” (348), her behaviors lead to her being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. Though Wren initially resents the consequences of her hospitalization—like having to return home every weekend—she also reassesses what is important and which people in her life will stand by her side through hardships, distancing herself from her hard-partying roommate to spend more time with her new boyfriend and Cath. To explore her adult identity, Wren veered away from her family, but as she truly comes of age, she realizes she does not need to distance herself from her family to be her own person.

Similarly, Cath realizes that she has an identity separate from Wren, her father, and her fanfiction community, though all three of them remain important to her. She learns to let go of the need to take responsibility for Wren and their father and to trust new friends like Levi and Reagan. Cath choosing to room with Reagan again and asking Wren to live on the same floor symbolize the happy medium she has found between being her own person and relying on her family. While Wren and Cath explore their identity in opposite ways as they come of age and enter college, they both eventually find healthy avenues for their growth into adulthood.