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Margot Waddell's On Adolescence: Inside Stories offers a fascinating examination of the internal life of the adolescent. By weaving together psychoanalytic theory, clinical vignettes, and works of literature, Waddell demonstrates how fictional characters and the images of poetry vivify the wildly fluctuating self states of adolescents. Her many citations from young adult fiction uniquely elaborate our understanding of the bizarre, chaotic journey this age group must undergo. Waddell focuses more on development than on psychopathology, though she makes clear, through her discussion of theory and her clinical accounts, that the adolescent can be vulnerable to hiccups and dangerous regressions during this difficult period. She helps us appreciate the powerful anxieties experienced when a young person attempts to engage and cope with external reality more and more independently. Waddell teaches the great value of literature for the adolescent reader by exemplifying how stories can concretize and represent the adolescent's divergent subjectivities: the ordinary versus the alien.
Waddell's command of literature is evident in the range and breadth of her literary citations, from Shakespeare to contemporary works. She highlights how much of young adult fiction consists of stories involving aliens, extreme experiences, or tales of survival, and she looks at how stories can capture and help the adolescent integrate what she calls “parallel universes” of the extreme and the ordinary. She notes there is a kind of “capsizing” of the personality as the adolescent tries to integrate newly arriving selves. These developments can include painful feelings like dread and uncertainty, as well as sexual and destructive urges (pp. 204-205). For example, she references The Little Friend by Donna Tartt and quotes a section of the book about Harriet, one of the protagonists. In reading these sections of Waddell's book, I strongly identified with Harriet's