While it’s possible “Dr.” Beatrice Sparks had her heart in the right place deep down, in wanting to warn teens away from legitimately bad things like drug abuse, dating teachers, and eating disorders, she went about it in spectacularly awful ways. She did nothing but preach, emotionally manipulate, and fear-monger. She also made absolutely no attempts to sound like an authentic teen.
31. I don’t recall anyone in the Nineties using the slang terms mag and magnif. In the early Nineties, popular words meaning “awesome” were phat and fly.
32. Nancy is beyond naïve to trust a strange man who starts touching her and takes her into the center hall to recover from her asthma attack at the Garth Brooks concert stampede that never happened. There were so many PSAs and after school specials about stranger danger in that era! Children of both sexes are told that if they’re lost, feeling unsafe, in trouble, etc., to find a woman with kids for help, followed by an older woman, a younger woman, and finally a dad with kids. Not lone men!
33. Are we supposed to believe a girl having an asthma attack at a concert would go completely unnoticed even when she’s shouting for help and cops are there to break up the stampede?
34. Or that she’d immediately trust the strange man who rubs her back without invitation and takes her alone into a sparsely-populated part of the hall? How convenient she feels like they have an instant connection and have known one another forever! That’s one of Sparks’s pet tropes.
35. Nancy always felt uneasy with boys, but the adult man is somehow Magickally special and different. I call BS every time a character who’s totally uninterested in dating instantly has her head turned by a grown man who in all likelihood wouldn’t be interested in a totally inexperienced teen.
36. Are we supposed to believe no one ever told Nancy about the dangers of dating adult men, or how creepy it is when an adult man wants to date an underage girl? At fourteen, I thought even a one-year age difference was gross, creepy, and suspicious!
37. Huge red flag when a guy you just met starts asking lots of questions about your parents! That’s not normal first meeting conversation.
38. Who the hell is “Caroline Tanner,” the school counselor who gives an endorsement in the front matter? Another made-up person like Nancy’s doctors, with a quote written by Sparks herself?
39. The cab driver who takes Nancy home after she wets herself at the movies on her 16th birthday shows way more concern for her than anyone else did after she was raped! He assumes she was “date-dumped” because she ran out of an alley covered in garbage, and urges her to go to a doctor and rape crisis center. He also tells her not to shower, since the rapist can be identified by semen.
40. Why is the South Carolina time zone earlier than Arizona’s? And speaking of time, why do all of Sparks’s characters always give the time at the start of an entry and when they come back to write more later in the day? How many published real diaries follow that custom?
41. It doesn’t seem realistic for Nancy’s friends to be so instantly supportive and understanding when she finally confesses she has AIDS. They hug, cry, and cuddle, and the sexist, controlling, creepy, red flag-dripping Lew holds her hand tighter and tighter while asking repeatedly, “Why you?” You know Nancy doesn’t say she got it from being raped because Lew would be pissed to discover he wasn’t dating a factory-sealed virgin! It’s a cruel reality of history that many people in the early Nineties were quite unaccepting and nasty towards those with AIDS, going so far as to run people out of town, threaten them, kick kids out of school, and enroll their own kids in new schools.
42. You know Sparks sped through the story in all of two years because she couldn’t be arsed to write a long, detailed book set over a much more realistic timeframe for going from HIV to advanced AIDS. She’d also lose her teen audience if Nancy aged too much.
43. Sparks just had to pack in as many AIDS complications as possible for maximum fear-mongering and dramatic effect. You name it, Nancy gets it! Sparks was obviously looking at lists of health issues and sprinkling them all in frantically.
44. For a supposed Catholic, Nancy uses an awful lot of very Mormon-specific language! Sparks just couldn’t keep her Molly Mormon fingerprints off every single book she wrote, making the clues of her authorship beyond obvious.
45. Of course Sparks couldn’t dare depict Nancy getting AIDS through a blood transfusion or consensual premarital sex. She had to be violently raped. Shades of the forced seduction trope so popular in Victorian erotica!
46. How many people are already showing symptoms of HIV within a month and a half of getting infected?!
47. When did Nancy start taking AZT? She only briefly mentions it in a long “The more you know!” PSA-type entry, where she worries about an eye infection and how she can only safely take one drug at a time. AZT did have more risk of bad side effects in the early days, but that wasn’t an automatic guarantee.
That drug was in mainstream use for HIV treatment by 1990! While it was eventually largely replaced by more modern, effective antiretrovirals, it did make a big difference in preserving people’s health and lives a bit longer. It’s very strange Nancy doesn’t discuss starting to take such an important drug or talk about any of her drugs except when it’s time to give an infodumpy lesson.
48. Mommykins screams at Nancy for having suicidal thoughts, yet still doesn’t take her to any kind of therapy. Nancy is encouraged to smile and keep sweet instead of working through her shattered psychological state.
49. Why isn’t Collin in jail? He was eventually identified as the creep who went around raping underage boys and girls both, yet he still saw no time inside of a prison cell.
#50 is so disgusting and unbelievable, I’m saving it for its own separate post!
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