“Story of a Girl” Analysis (or, What We Can Learn About Defying Audience Expectations from Sara Zarr, Robert McKee, and “Rashomon”)
I remember starting to read Sara Zarr’s blog in something like spring 2006 – I would have been a third year in film school, if I’m right. I was disarmed immediately by the emotional honesty of her blog: As an insecure young man in one of the most stressful colleges in the country, it was like a joyous epiphany for me to realize I was not the only one who believed, despite outward signposts of the opposite, that I was TEH SUCK.
Sara’s fictional work has the same indelible feeling of verisimilitude that simultaneously makes my heart expand in recognition, and crumble in empathy. In fact, for novel-writing pointers regarding moment-by-moment emotional truth, I don’t think there’s any greater example than her work.
But that’s actually not what I’d like to look at today.
Rather (as the title of this post very subtly hints), I’d like to consider What We Can Learn About Defying Audience Expectations from Sara Zarr, Robert McKee, and “Rashomon.”
Story of a Girl Analysis
When she is caught in the backseat of a car – with her older brother’s best friend – Deanna Lambert’s teenage life is changed forever. Struggling to overcome the lasting repercussions and the stifling role of “school slut,” she longs to escape a life defined by her past. With subtle grace, complicated wisdom and striking emotion, Story of a Girl reminds us of our human capacity for resilience, epiphany and redemption.
That’s a quick summary – thanks to Amazon.com – of Zarr’s debut novel. I recently reread Sara’s National Book Award nom’d Story of a Girl. I’d gotten it from the library in hardback before, read it shortly after it first came out; and while I loved it back then – and learned a lot about how to write a young adult novel from it – I don’t think I fully gave it its due. Because what I’ve come to realize is that Story of a Girl is one of the wisest thematic powerhouses I’ve read in quite sometime.
But before I get to that, I want to point a couple things out.
That three-sentence summary does something all summaries of great books do: It immediately conjures in the mind of the audience the Obligatory Scene.
That funky-soundin’ term was coined by Robert McKee, screenplay guru, author of the brilliant STORY ,and the man who chewed the crud outta Nicholas Cage in Adaptation. And what is that Scene Which Be Obligatory? It has three main characteristics.
The first two: It is the scene that must occur for the audience’s satisfaction to be fulfilled, and which is immediately foreshadowed by the premise itself. In Jaws, since the premise is about a sheriff trying to stop a killer shark, we know, as experienced audience members, that the sheriff and shark must go head-to-head (or head to…beek? do shark shave beeks?) on the open sea. If that never happened, we would be left unsatisfied.
So, in Story of a Girl, since the primary conflict is about Deanna being saddled with the role as “school slut,” the Obligatory Scene is one in which she overcomes her reputation. (Of course, it’s not always a single scene, and in subtler, more realistic work like Story of a Girl, it isn’t.) And yet…
Here’s the other important thing about the Obligatory Scene: It must also be unexpected. (Or, as I seem to recall William Goldman once saying about what successful storytelling is, “You have to give the audience what they want, in a way they never expected.“)
Anyhoot!
Why all this jabberwocky about the Obligatory Scene, if what I really want to talk about is the theme of Story of a Girl?
Answer: All this jabbwocky because I think it’s in the reversal of audience expectations of the Obligatory Scene that the theme is ultimately unveiled.
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The theme is hinted at in the deceptively simple title itself: Story of a Girl is primarily about storytelling, and the great and terrible power therein.
Having a reputation is storytelling, isn’t it? Other people tell stories about you, and there are conflicting stories, and maybe there is no “true” version. Because that’s the thing we all know about reputations: It’s all sort of Heisenberg-ian (quantum physics reference, FTW!). In other words, you get what you’re looking for. If people think Deanna’s a slut, they’ll say, Hey, look at those jeans, they’re pretty tight, eh? They think she’s a bitch, they’ll say, Jesus, what’s she so freaking defensive about? In other words, what the truth is about storytelling – and what Zarr so beautifully conveys – is that people will always find evidence to support whatever story they’ve already accepted. Like the off-screen judge in the classic Japanese film Rashomon, we in life are constantly making judgments based on limited information, zero hard evidence, and our own invisible and oft-subconscious bias. Indeed, one particular passage – on page 125 in the paperback edition – made me sit up and think, Dude – Rashomon!
And that was the whole problem, really, that this thing had happened between us, and to Tommy it was one thing and to me it was something else, and once my dad got involved it became something else again. Three people at the scene of the crime, each with a different story. Add onto that the whole jury known as Terra Nova High School and who knew anymore what had really happened?
In case ya’ll have never seen Rashomon, it’s about – and I’m using IMDb’s summary here – “a heinous crime and its aftermath being recalled from differing points of view – a bandit’s, a husband’s, and a wife’s.” The story is a series of flashbacks told to an aforementioned off-screen judge. Spoiler alert: In the end, you never know what the truth was.
In the respect that they’re both about storytelling and the hard-to-grasp-as-mist qualities of truth, Story of a Girl is similar to Rashomon. But I actually find SOAG more satisfying an experience. Why? Because, in Zarr’s case, I think the book actually provides an answer – though it’s not a “Oh, the bandit’s version was true,” snoozer kind of thing.
So that leads us to the question: What is the answer to the mystery of the Story, and how does the Obligatory Scene help to remedy it while also defying audience expectations?
In the end of the book, in the Reading Group Guide, it says, How does Deanna finally break free from her reputation? One would think, of course, that the only way she could would be to get other people to understand that she’s not a slut. (And I can specifically remember thinking when I first read it [forgive my slightly-more-youthful ignorance!], that that was the obvious and inevitable ending.)
Wrongo.
For what Zarr does is rather astonishing. Because in the end, the world’s views of Deanna never really change. Many many people still think of her as the school slut.
Except one person’s view of Deanna has changed.
Deanna’s.
Through an understated and elegant ending that embraces the power of forgiveness and hope, Zarr confounds our expectations. And we realize that what she “was saying” was that the real “jury “- the one that matters, and the only one that can change how Deanna experiences her life (and that’s what she’s really after, though maybe she doesn’t know it) – is Deanna herself.
In other words, Zarr says, it’s not our past – the events of our lives – that define us. If anything does, it’s our RESPONSE to those events. And our response is largely dictated – if not TOTALLY dictated – BY THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES.
In (even more!) other words, Deanna is only able to break free – ALL of us are only able to break free – by taking control of our stories. There’s this great line about reputations my dad used to tell me in high school: “What you think of me is none of my business.” Pretty terrific, eh? But here’s the thing: Zarr is saying – and I absolutely agree, on the deepest level possible – that what WE used to think of ourselves is none of OUR OWN business.
To live freely, take control of your own story. Sometimes the power to do that comes to you by unexpected grace; sometimes it is pried from you by necessity on a threshold of catastrophe. But whatever the case, a story of a girl – or boy – is ultimately determined by what they choose to believe about themselves. The moment Deanna chooses to believe she is not a slut – and doesn’t deserve to be viewed as one, and truly ACTS on that belief – she’s taking the first steps toward freedom.
And with that revelation, Zarr gives us exactly what we wanted – for Deanna to grow – but in a way totally unexpected. And because it is so wise, the book hums in the memory like only the best may do.
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So!
Does that make sense? My first in-depth analysis on the blog, and I must admit my mental muscles feel darn good for it. But before I end, I’d like to post my three big thoughts about what all this means:
- To make an ending truly powerful, give the audience what they want, in a way that is surprising both dramatically and thematically. Zarr’s book contains no big whiz-bang Obligatory Scene – just a series of relatively quiet ones in which a deeper, truer version of Deanna is revealed to herself and the audience. And the ending also leaves us with the tremendous wisdom, not even hinted at early in the book, that while we may be our stories, we also create our stories.
- To create a truly powerful thematic journey, use Robert McKee’s strategy of “the negation of the negation.” Most stories fail because they don’t go far enough, deep enough, into the “negative version” of their “positive theme.” In other words, the positive theme of SOAG represents truth; a lesser story, therefore, would only have dealt with the “negative version” of that value: lies. But Zarr is a much savvier storyteller than most, for she realizes that the worst possible opposite of truth isn’t lies – it’s SELF-DECEPTION. By creating an even more negative version of the story’s negative value, she makes Deanna’s journey much more harrowing and convincing.
- Hinting at the theme in a title can be very powerful, especially when the title contains hidden meaning. I already talked a bit about this. So how ’bout I let Ms. Zarr herself give her opinion on it?
Hey Mike,
This is quite possibly my favorite email of all time. While I haven’t seen Rashomon, and didn’t really think of all this stuff on a conscious level while writing the book, these are all things I was working out in the story. And – I didn’t realize myself until way after I settled on that title that the “story” in the story, is, in fact, about stories – all the versions, and the ones we tell ourselves. I think it’s a recurring theme in my work, because it all has to do with identity and that’s a biggie in Sweethearts, too.
Anyway, thanks so much for the second read and the response…awesome.
Have a great weekend -
Sara
So – yeah. Nice to know I’m not totally crazy :]
