About 4 or 5 years ago a friend of mine handed me a book that looked a little worse for wear and told me that I needed to stop everything and read this story. The book was dog eared, I could see highlighter had been used in places and the spine was barely in one piece because it had clearly been read and dissected on multiple occasions. The book was Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher and it absolutely blew me away.
For those of you who have not heard of it this is the story of Hannah Baker, before the beginning of the book she has died by suicide and no one really knows why. Her classmate Clay comes home several days later to a box of tapes on his front doorstep, he puts tape #1 in the machine and hears Hannah’s voice saying there are thirteen reasons why she killed herself and if you’re listening to the tapes you’re one of them. What unfolds is a story that is powerful and shocking and horribly familiar for many of us. There is no one particular event that everything can be traced back to, instead the little things just add up to a weight that no one person can bear.
My subjective reading of the book is that it is not so much about suicide and why it happens or the impact that it has on other people, but about the consequences our everyday actions can have on others. An interaction that meant very little to other characters was yet another thing that made Hannah feel life was not worth living. It’s the type of book which keeps you thinking long after you finish those final words, the impact we each have on the lives of the people around us is something that we often don’t consider but this novel made me reexamine how I interacted with others. Like many people I was bullied at times in my life and there were parts of Hannah’s story that were so familiar to me, I think that is what makes this book so amazing it doesn’t over dramatise bullying or use euphemisms for what happens to her. Instead what it shows is an honest representation of bullying and how devastating it can be for the victim while having little to no impact on the perpetrator.
For obvious reasons it has all the triggers warnings and I always make sure to tell people that when I press my own dog eared, underlined and tea stained copy into their hands. It is a book that I have given to so many friends and family members and has prompted many a conversation with people who I least expect to have already read it.
If you have a Netflix account (or even if you don’t) you may have heard of the thirteen episode miniseries for this book which was released on March 31st, called 13 Reasons Why. While I have not watched the whole series yet, it’s not something that I really wanted to binge watch because I figured it would be too emotional for that, what I have seen so far has been pretty good. The show manages to capture the pressure of going through high school under the microscope of social media without ever trivializing the events or over dramatising them. It does add in plot lines that were not present in the book, but for the most part I think it’s doing a decent job.
Translating a story from book to screen is difficult and something is always lost along the way, often that is the ability to take your own interpretation of a story. Once it is on screen it can be hard to take your own “reading” of a story as you are given a complete visual image, there is no longer the space for your brain to fill in the gaps. A TV episode presents the viewer with someone else’s interpretation which may not be the same as your interpretation of the story. While I have found the show interesting, I do think that the original book was a better medium for this tale. If you haven’t experienced Thirteen Reasons Why yet I would say yes it is a difficult story but it is loved by so many people for good reasons and I recommend you pick up the book as soon as you are able to.