"To really be a nerd, she decided, you had to prefer fiction worlds to the real one."
As an avid reader, there are certain books that just hit me. A plot or a character or a message knocks me off my feet, and changes the way I look at things. The same goes for movies. The Breakfast Club completely changed my perception of my life, and how I look at the world and the way I interact with people. Pieces of art like that don't just disappear. They stay with you for years to come. You can look at the pages of a book or look at a scene in a movie and think "this is who I am."
For me, this realization came in the form of Rainbow Rowell's novel Fangirl. I stumbled upon Fangirl in 2014, after seeing that Mugglenet, a popular Harry Potter fan page, had done a review on it. Now, obviously, any book that says the word "fangirl" in the title is one that I will be interested in. I throw myself whole-heartedly into nerd culture; being a fangirl is just part of who I am. So it's really no surprise that I'm writing about Fangirl, and its main character Cath Avery.
Cath Avery is an introverted college freshman who suffers from a great deal of anxiety. At the start of the novel, she is starting fall semester without the aid of her twin sister, who is all about the College Experience. Cath is already nervous enough about starting college, about being away from her father, who suffers from perhaps even more anxiety than she does. To add the absence of her sister on top of that is no easy task. She finds solace in the world of Simon Snow, a Harry Potter-esque fictional universe where she is one of the most popular fanfiction writers on a fanfic-writing website. Her story "Carry On" has hits in the hundreds of thousands and she sometimes feels that the people who read her stories — nothing more than random strangers on the internet — understood her better than her own family did.
The first time I read this book, I hadn't started college yet. I had moved from Florida to North Carolina directly after high school, so I had to essentially start all over again. I had to establish residency, find a college to attend, actually apply. Like Cath, I found solace in fictional universes, the likes of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. I was anxious in public, social situations, just like Cath, and found fictional universes and internet friends better than the real world and real people. Prior to Fangirl, I had never found a character that so perfectly captured my experience: dealing with anxiety and finding comfort in online communities filled with people who shared my similar fandom interests.
My similarities to Cath Avery don't stop there, though. Once I actually got into college and started my own freshman year, I started to realize that there was more to me being Cath Avery than liking fictional universes. Cath's anxiety prevented her from doing a lot her freshman year: she didn't make friends with anyone on her hall, only barely interacted with her roommate, and scavenged food in her room to avoid going to the dining hall because no one gave her proper instructions on how to do so. When I re-read Fangirl during the first semester of my freshman year, I realized that I could add another reason why Cath and I were alike to my list.
Due to the circumstances of my move, getting into college was a very rushed ordeal. I didn't have time to take a tour, or go to orientation, or even meet my roommate until it was move-in day. Of course, I adore my freshman year roommate now, but just like Cath, I found my roommate to be fiercely intimidating. I hardly ever saw her, only in the mornings when she was getting ready or if she had to change out her books between classes. Cath's roommate, Reagan, much like my own roommate, eventually took pity on Cath and went out of her way to include her, and take her to dinner, and invite her places. They do grow to become good friends, but at first, Cath is a charity case, which is exactly how I felt to my roommate and her friends. Now it's a different situation, but at the time I felt embarrassed to have to have my roommate take care of me and drag me along like a little kid, much like Cath does. Reagan helps Cath integrate into college life the way my roommate did, and both Cath and I came to realize that college wasn't the worst thing that could ever happen.
Cath and I also share similar career interests: she is an English major, much like myself, and hopes to become an author. I, too, wish to write books for the rest of my life. As Cath's fiction-writing professor says, "there is nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing." I love that there is a character like Cath who not only shares similar interests with me but has a similar mindset about what she wants to do with her life.
While dealing with all of this, Cath still manages to live her own version of the College Experience. She starts to understand that the real world isn't so bad and that it is possible to still want to live in a fictional world while still living in the real world. This is something that I continue to learn and experience every day. I love the friends that I've made on the internet, and sometimes on my worst days they are still the best people I can talk to, but at the end of the day it's beneficial to me to dive head first into the things that make me the most anxious in the real world. Yes, it's scary, but if Cath can do it, then I definitely can.
You might as well slap a sticker that says "Hello, My Name Is Cath Avery" on my forehead, with all of the commonalities I share with her. Anxiety can be a terrible thing, as I'm sure some of you can attest to, and oftentimes all I want to do is curl up with a book and disappear into that universe. In fact, it is because of this notion that I found Cath and Fangirl in the first place. I wanted to lose myself, and when I came out on the other side, all I did was find another part of me.
