Quote:
I recently put down a book I was reading by a fairly well known author - a middle-aged man - who was trying to write first person perspective for a teenage girl with some emotional difficulties. And it sounded exactly like that. (To be clear: it sounded to me like a middle-man trying to sound like a teenage girl.)
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In my mind one of the most extreme examples in fiction of a middle-aged male writer’s inability to create a relatable characterization of a teenage (preteen actually; she is twelve) girl is Nabokov’s Lolita - he doesn’t even attempt to give her any personality, but presents her solely as the object of the narrator’s pedophilia in wheezy prose that provides cover for his audience to defend its reading of a tale which, when stripped of its literary pretensions, is nothing more than a depiction of child rape.
Pierre Lawrence