Remember What It Was Like to Feel Infinite?
The Perks of Being a Wallflower still hits
When I posted the photo below on my Instagram story on March 20, 2024, it had been a full quarter-century since I first read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. My husband and I were driving back from dinner at our favorite Mexican place. The sunroof was open, the windows were down, Spotify was on shuffle, and I’m pretty sure my soul left my body for four minutes and twenty-eight seconds as my hair whipped around in the wind while I sang at the top of my lungs.
That’s the kind of snapshot memory you make when you’re feeling infinite, which is how I’ve thought of those magical moments when you feel one with the universe and everything is briefly perfect ever since Perks gave me the language for it.
It’s a rare book that sticks with you for 25 years, and I’ll admit that I was nervous about going back to a text that was so formative for me.
Millions of readers have found solace and delight in this perfect time capsule of millennial nostalgia since MTV Books (the most 1999 thing ever) published it, and I’m so grateful for a chance to revisit it. While it didn’t land with my 43-year-old self the same way it did when I was 17, it did something I appreciate more by providing me an opportunity to think about the girl who felt connected to something bigger when she picked up this tiny book.
I’ve taken a lot of late-night, windows-down, music-up drives in the intervening decades and experienced more than my fair share of “I feel infinite” moments. What a gift it is to know them when I see them. What thanks I owe Stephen Chbosky for helping teach me how.