Words on My Walls: A Literary Review on Words on Bathroom Walls (Part One)
As a young reader, I have discovered many authors and genres that are fun to get into. I believe it is important to be versatile as a reader and writer to be able to gain a more profuse understanding as well as a well-rounded perspective on the world.
Literature is the key to an open mind and an acceptance of the changing world around us. That’s why new and current authors are just as important to read as old classical literature. Especially since it carries relevant life within its pages.
One of the novels I will be first discussing is Words on Bathroom Walls. As a young student, I find that it is important for the struggles with mental health for teenagers to be placed in the spotlight.
Julia Walton, the author of Words on Bathroom Walls, writes about a young teenage boy, by the name of Adam Petrizelli, who struggles with schizophrenia. He goes to a catholic school and tries to make his life as normal as possible as he battles his own mind.
In this current day and age, mental health has been a major topic of debate as doctors, parents, therapists, and even psychologists try to put the puzzle pieces together as they educate the modern world of the struggles that people go through within each person’s thoughts.
Today, teenagers have been the main subject in the world of mental health, and rightfully so. We still do not have all the answers, and there are still people who do not believe that such mental problems as “small” as depression and anxiety exist.
With Walton’s book, she can relate to not only specific people who struggled with schizophrenia, but she is also able to connect with a young audience that has similar fears about growing up and finding themselves.
Words on Bathroom Walls does not only help its audience understand what living with schizophrenia is like, but it also shows how most teenagers feel inside, regardless of the issues for mental health.
For teenagers, this book is an outlet of empathy and acceptance, while for adults, this book is an outlet for learning and tolerance.
Teens will tend to read Young Adult (YA) novels because they feel and think the same way. They may enjoy the plots or the characters, but they like them so much because they are exactly like them.
For adults, YA novels might be exciting and fun, but for many, it is to understand their students or children because they forget who they were at that age. In some cases, they might skim the shelves of the YA section because they want to understand what it might mean for our young people to go through traumatic experiences, battling depression and anxiety, or even growing up with a mental disability.
Fictional texts allow for an open space for authors, like Julia Walton, to lead their audience through the experience of someone who doesn’t even exist. Even though it may be all fictional, it allows for people to learn more about the endeavors of others and how they cope and learn to accept who they are.
Just like the wise words of Atticus, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee). This ability allows for all of us to take a walk through someone else’s shoes, or in this case, Adam Petrizelli’s shoes, to see from a new perspective.
Citation
Walton, Julia. Words on Bathroom Walls. New York, Ember, 2018.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.
