Dear Stephen Chbosky,

I read "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" for the first time the summer before my sophomore year of high school and it quickly became my favorite book. I read it at the right time in my life and it really resonated with me and was able to help me. Here’s how:

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" gave me a main character that I could relate to. I am like Charlie in many ways. He is shy and sensitive. Like him, I became friends with older people at the start of high school that weren’t a lot like me, which pushed me to grow some. Charlie is a wallflower, he listens, observes, and above anything else understands. His representation of these qualities showed me how nice it was to be this way, which made me more comfortable being that way in my own life.

This book made me realize that I have to act on how I feel and have to put myself first sometimes. Charlie makes the mistake with Sam of not acting on his feelings for her, which could have possibly made the situation different. He also consistently put others before himself, which helped his friends, but didn’t help him. From Charlie’s mistakes I learned to consider myself and my feelings while still caring about others.

It made me want to go to a late-night showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." I finally went and it was something that I ended up loving it a lot. Even though I just wanted to go because of a book I read, it turned out to be a great opportunity for me to put myself out there by dressing up and just having fun.

This book described feelings I had that I thought I was alone in having. How Charlie was, “both happy and sad at the same time” or his description of reading a book as a, “really great experience.” It also allowed me to justify my feelings. Charlie saying that “even if somebody has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have” seemed so important because before I would think “Oh, they have problems greater than mine, I shouldn’t be this upset” and after reading this book I didn’t have to feel guilty for feeling upset when I did.

The way I understand friendship is similar to how the book describes it. Charlie acknowledges that Sam and Patrick, “just knew” and that that was really all that he could ask of a friend. This described the connection that I expected to have with friends and it made it seem realistic.

A lot of your book talks about happiness and I read this book at a time when I was struggling greatly with my own happiness. It made me feel okay and it made me feel hopeful. When I finished reading the book I was left feeling hopeful because, “even though we don’t get to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”

Thank you for writing a book that helped me accept myself,

Maya