You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn’t really hit you, and then when it does, that’s when you feel like shit.”
— Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
by Jesse Andrews

I’ll start by confusing you with an excerpt from my 2013 review of an entirely different book, John Green’s young adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars”:

“… when ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ came out I put it on my to-read list …. [k]nowing that it has a very dark theme, I suspected it would … be challenged by parents. [Darkness, and] … concern over a growing body of YA literature characterized as ‘sick lit.’ This novel is about teenagers suffering from cancer. Teenagers who will die (sorry if that’s a spoiler). As such, Green’s novel is both dark and sick, and I expect it is only a matter of time until some parent or religious group demands it be removed from a school library or a high school English class reading list.”

I mention TFIOS for a couple of reasons. One, the subject of this review, Jesse Andrews’ YA novel “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” also about teenagers suffering and dying from cancer, is frequently compared to TFIOS. Two, neither novel (both published in 2012) generated any initial controversy. TFIOS began to be protested and banned in 2014; since then the novel has earned a more or less permanent place on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged books. Me and Earl skated until 2021, when it was challenged at a school board meeting. More protests followed (it is now seventh on the ALA’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books).

It’s a bit of a break to read and review popular young adult novels that aren’t being challenged and banned for making white children feel uncomfortable about the mistreatment of minorities, or because their authors dared to include gay, lesbian, and transgender characters. Nope. The problem school board teabaggers have with these two novels is the same one their blue-nosed forebears had with “The Catcher in the Rye” in the 1950s: kids having adult thoughts and expressing them in profane language, which they, with the intent to mislead, conflate with pornography

Now to the actual review portion of this review of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”: I didn’t like it nearly as much as I liked “The Fault in Our Stars.” Greg, the high school senior who’s the first-person narrator of Me and Earl, is so obviously a 30-something man pretending to be a teenager, it distracts from the story. He’s tiresome, irritating, repetitive, and dislikable, and thank goodness Earl and Rachel make the few appearances they do because otherwise I might have thrown the book across the room. That’s pretty much all I have to say about my personal reaction to Me and Earl.

As to the challenges and bans taking place around the country as organized groups of reactionaries pretending to be parents disrupt school board meetings over “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” claiming it’s pornographic: no, it is anything but. To be fair, though, I’ll quote a couple of wanna-be Me and Earl banners:

“Found this on my local library’s shelf in the Young Adult section. My daughter picked it up because she had heard it was a good book. Glad I started looking through it out of curiosity. This book contains soft porn descriptions of oral sex and female genitalia. PROLIFIC language. I know this is written from the perspective of a teenage boy but the content I just referred to is completely unnecessary and takes away from the story line. Not every teenage boy thinks/talks this way. This book is very adult and it was highly concerning to me that my local library did not put a warning label to give parents the option of screening it before their pre-teen/teen checked it out. So parents, here is your warning label!”

“First, I can’t believe we’ve set the bar so low that a story of a dying girl can be used to smother in literary porn. But that’s exactly what this is. Sure, there will be those who say ‘but that’s how teenager talk and think’ without asking if this is how they want their teenager to talk and think. So can this book be redeemed simply because it has a story buried beneath a mountain of filth. I would say no, stay away from it. This book will not ‘open your child’s mind’ it will only fill it with sewage.”

Do I have to say it? There are no “porn descriptions of oral sex and female genitalia” in this book, soft or otherwise. There is no sex at all. Neither Greg, nor Earl, nor Rachel have ever had sex, nor do they even seem to want to. Here’s what’s actually in the book:

• Earl and Greg are fond of the word “fuck” and say it often, as high school boys do
• Earl, joking around with Greg at one point (and not within earshot of Rachel), utters the words “eat pussy”

That’s it. Bad words on a page. Are. Not. Pornography. Unless you live In MAGA-land, that is, where the cult leader can say fuck this and fuck that and brag about grabbing pussy all day long but if kids use the same language it magically becomes pornography.

Honestly, I wish I’d liked this book better.

Here are a few links, if you’d like to know more:

• ALA Intellectual Freedom Blog: Challenged Book Spotlight: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
• Lancaster Online: Elizabethtown Area School District parent challenges best-selling novel ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’
• Commonsense Media: Parent reviews for Me and Earl and the Dying Girl