A Book for Our Time

When I was what the book world now designates a “young adult,” I was enthralled with animal-centric tales such as “The Black Stallion,” “My Friend Flicka” and “Call of the Wild.” I don’t recall ever identifying with any book’s human heroine. Whatever kid lit there was on a girl’s coming-of-age emotionally and sexually — beyond the gender-biased “On Becoming a Woman” — was beyond the purview of my family or school.

How I wish “I Am Here Now,” a new book by Barbara Bottner, was available back then. Old adult that I now am, this young anti-heroine’s journey is one to which I can relate.

Her story unfolds in the Bronx in 1960 in and around the soon-to-be broken home of a Hungarian Jewish family. Maisie Meyers is the troubled, talented, 15-year-old protagonist, who feels life more intensely than her violent, vengeful mother believes is kosher. While Maisie can well understand why her father is leaving her mother, she loathes him for abandoning her and her alienated brother. In addition to her familial and high-school freshman agonies, Maisie is assaulted (waist up) by two thuggish teen locals after Hebrew school one day, and is afraid to go back to Temple Emmanuel. She longs to confide in her younger brother, Davy, but is just beginning to realize how troubled he also is. She knows she can’t tell her parents or grandmother, as they’re too self-preoccupied to give her the comfort she craves. 

There is no place, especially inside her own evolving body, that she can be at peace.

Maisie finds a confidante in cute Irish guy Richie, also from a fraught household in the next building, and the two commiserate about escalating conflicts between their parents. When Richie speaks in reverent terms of James Joyce or sheds a tear at hearing of her sexual victimization, Maisie is turned off. She seems to have an image of the qualities she wants from a kissable boy, and sensitivity isn’t one of them: “Kindness kills romance for me.” She seeks sweet refuge in the apartment of schoolmate Rachel and her creative mother, Kiki, who becomes a mentor to Maisie’s artistic gifts. 

As Maisie’s home life grows more disturbing, Rachel and Kiki provide sanctuary and home-cooked Greek meals. The appearance of Gino, a male model with whom Rachel is romantically entwined, creates confusion for Maisie: “He leaves and takes my breath right out the door with him.” Her body seems to have developed a mind of its own where he is concerned and, unfortunately, he and Rachel notice.

 Old adult that I now am, this young anti-heroine’s journey is one to which I can relate.

Maisie’s first-person expression of her inner life is written in verse both elegant and eloquent; the writing’s simplicity surprises in the complexity of its impact. As the tale progresses, her ventriloquist, prolific author, Bottner — who has 40 books for young minds under her belt — throws increasing amounts of turmoil Maisie’s way.

Donning her mother’s clothes in her closet, Maisie realizes “I’m trying to wear my mother. It’s the only way I can get close to her.” The elaborate excuses she fabricates when caught arouse her mother’s rage rather than empathy. She wishes her mother could learn to weep, as Maisie has found that “crying is like a prayer.” About a boy’s first touch, Maisie says, “His hands are food.” As her talents as a painter expand in Kiki’s studio and art world, providing an outlet for an enormous emotional and artistic drive, Maisie calls her pleasure “benign delirium.”

I can’t wait to have a lap-sized grandchild so I can escape into other children’s books by Bottner. Titles such as “Two Messy Friends” and “Marsha Makes Me Sick” tantalize; “The Crankypants Tea Party,” released in June, about stuffed animals boycotting their owner’s tea because they’ve been treated carelessly, might have relevance for children coming to consciousness in complicated times.

“I Am Here Now” may help other complex young women shift perspectives toward self-acceptance while being trapped in quarantine in homes and bodies they’re soon to outgrow. Reading it now illuminated a lot of lost, dark years in my own development.

Melanie Chartoff has acted on Broadway and television.