The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Charlie Chbosky

How do you find your place? And how do you keep it? The Perks of Being a Wallflower, at its core, is a book about friendship and the underrated importance of platonic love. It shows how a few good friends can make nothing else matter. If you do not have someone to share life with, it sometimes might seem like it is not worth living. From the point of view of someone who has always been on the outside, watching instead of doing, this book asks and tries to answer the age-old question of how to fit in. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the author addresses heavy topics that some writers are not willing to tackle. Chbosky could just as easily have written a book about a perfectly healthy kid with tons of friends and a happy family. Instead, he chose to be more realistic. Charlie struggles internally with repressed, traumatic memories and the grief that comes with the death of close friends and family. The last thing on his mind is trying to find new friends, but once he does, he realizes that was all he needed and everything else seems to go away. “When we got out of the
Charlie knows this firsthand. After experiencing the amount of love that comes with a true friendship, going back to before feels exponentially worse. Charlie makes a mistake in the book that makes his friendships take a real hit. He was told to “stay away for while” while things cooled down. He did as he was told and kept his distance, but he started to relapse back into how he was before. “I wish I could report that it’s getting better, but unfortunately it isn’t. It’s hard, too, because we’ve started school again, and I can’t go to the places where I used to go. And it can’t be like it was. And I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.” (pg. 142) It really hurts Charlie to not have his friends, but fortunately, things go back to normal, but only after a huge amount of damage