Paula Denzinger – American Author 1944-2004
As a teenager, Paula Danziger read The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger) repeatedly because it reassured her that she “wasn’t alone.” As an adult, her best-selling young adult novels have engendered that response in junior high-age readers since the publication of the popular The Cat Ate My Gymsuit (1974). Several years as a junior high school English teacher, along with a vivid recall of her own painful adolescence, helped Paula Danziger forge this successful connection with her audience. Her narrators, typically female, with a first-person narrative voice, fight for their rights within their less-than-perfect families and schools^ while simultaneously suffering the typically teenage blights of acne and awkwardly emerging sexuality. Through it all, they keep intact a sharp, occasionally pun-laden, sense of humor.
The therapeutic role literature played in her own life fostered Paula Danziger’s commitment to write about difficult situations her young readers commonly face. Her books don’t shy away from ugly emotions, such as the anger Phoebe harbors for her materialistic mother in The Divorce Express (1982) or Cassie’s comic but real fear that her dictatorial homeroom teacher will make her remove her sunglasses, exposing her overly tweezed eyebrows in The Pistachio Prescription (1978). Along with her best-selling status, Paula Danziger has received numerous regional awards as well as two Parents’ Choice Awards for Literature.
Some critics, however, have faulted her for offering teens easily digestible cliches about themselves. Thirteen-year-old Marcy Lewis in The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Danziger’s self-proclaimed autobiographical novel, provides a counter to this criticism when she points out that “middle-class kids have problems too.” Most of Danziger’s heroines’ problems stem from adults more concerned with exercising authority than with listening, although one or two sympathetic teachers or parents usually surface in each book to act as mentors, encouraging young people not to conform but to stand up for themselves. Paula Danziger herself found such a mentor in the poet John Ciardi, who nurtured her appreciation for literature and gave her the courage to believe she could actually become a writer.
Not only issues of self-esteem but political concerns such as women’s rights, the rights of young people, education reform, and environmentalism thread their way through Paula Danziger’s stories. She has taken a traditionally liberal stance, mobilizing her teenage characters to work together within the system for change. Though sticking to the same types of main characters and issues, her writing has evolved over the years: her perspective has become less black and white and her humor less angry.
Everyone Else’s Parents Said Yes (1989) marks a switch to third-person narration and a male protagonist -eleven-year-old Matthew, also featured in succeeding books. But as with all of Paula Danziger’s stories, the Matthew books exist firmly within the often tumultuous realm of the everyday.
First appearing in 1994, Amber Brown soon became Paula Danzinger’s most popular character. In each of the books devoted to Amber, the first-person narratives develop an issue important to young readers. Excellent chapter books for the beginning reader, the books have been enhanced by Tony Ross’s art.
C.M.H.
Source: Children’s Books and their Creators, Anita Silvey.
