By Nancy Garden
Ananya
First published in 1982, Nancy Garden’s Annie on my Mind, is a lesbian teen fiction. It’s a book which, even after more than 25 years, feels like something that is tailor-made to address the first rush of ‘queer’ emotion we ever feel in our lives.
Eliza Winthrop is a high-school student at a private school named Foster Academy, in Brooklyn. On a visit to Metropolitan Museum of Art for working on her project, she meets Annie Kenyon. Annie goes to a public school and lives with her parents – a bookkeeper and a cabdriver – and grandmother in a lower-income part of Brooklyn. Though they have different backgrounds and goals in life, their first meeting could be described as a sort of ‘friendship’ at first sight. They go out for picnics, visit museums and continue to meet while their friendship grows more intense and transforms into love- a love that they do accept but cannot describe. The story moves forward with a backdrop of various incidents at Eliza’s school, homophobic teachers, a forced ‘coming out’, unexpected sources of support and of course, love and intimacy.
The book, for its most part, is Eliza’s ‘flashback narrative’ while she is trying to write a letter to Annie, in response to the numerous letters that Annie has written to her. Nancy Garden’s writing can hold on to your pulse and there’s never a dull moment. For some of us, going through the book can feel like reading the pages of an old personal diary. For teenagers, the book offers a relatedness of experience on a personal level, which makes it a must-read!
Annie on my Mind puts forward a basic premise that being gay is not only about sex; it is about love. The book was banned and even burned, at a school in Kansas followed by a court trial which was settled in favour of Nancy Garden. However, can time or bigotry ever overpower a premise that beats like a relentless passion in millions of hearts?
