Annie on My Mind

Garden, N. (1982). Annie on My Mind. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-30366-5

Why read this book

How do two young people sustain their love when many of their classmates and the adults around them oppose it? Liza and Annie find out in this romance set in New York City.

Plot summary

One day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Liza, a 17-year-old senior at a small private school in Brooklyn, is drawn to a gallery where she hears someone singing quietly. The singer turns out to be Annie, a senior at a public high school on the north side of Manhattan. Liza and Annie quickly become the best of friends. Through the fall and winter they hang out together in museums, cafes, and their families’ apartments whenever their school schedules allow. Before long they know that their love is more than friendship. Annie has already realized that she is a lesbian, but Liza hasn’t really thought about it before. By spring their exploration of their relationship brings them into confrontation with unaccepting classmates and adults, threatening Liza’s ability to finish high school and testing the strength of the love between Liza and Annie.

Critical evaluation

The dramatic arc of the novel is nicely structured around three spirals of tension. First there is the suspense over whether Liza and Annie will become lovers, then the suspense over what consequences they might face, and then the suspense over whether their relationship can endure the challenges. Liza’s first-person narration is written from the perspective of her first year in college, a year after she and Annie met, and we know from the beginning that Liza has not responded to Annie’s letters for some months. Will this be a story of a love succumbing to external opposition or a story of love prevailing?

Garden’s careful dramatization of the deepening love between Liza and Annie, which was on the cutting edge in the early 1980s when the book was published, holds up well now, nearly 30 years later, when popular culture and the public struggles of the LGBTQ community and their allies have moved the public further along on these issues. Garden does not deny the oppression within which Liza and Annie must define their relationship, but she centralizes their resistance to the hostility around them, and that, hopefully, is the lesson that young readers are most likely to take from the story. Garden also positions this same-sex drama partially within a more universal context. Heterosexual readers are likely to identify with many aspects of the romance, such as the pleasure that Liza takes in describing the townhouse that becomes a physical haven for her and Annie in the spring of their senior year.

About the author

Nancy Garden was born in 1938 in Boston and grew up in New England and New York. She worked in the theater and in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. She published her first books in 1971, and has since written some three dozen, mostly fiction for children and young adults but also non-fiction and one adult novel (Garden, 2009).

Garden decided to write a book like Annie on My Mind as a teenager after reading Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian novel from the 1920s:

That made me vow, at around 16, to write a book for my people that ended happily. The result of that vow, after a few false starts, was Annie, which was published in 1982 when there was still very little written or published for kids about homosexuality, and even less that had a gay or lesbian main character and a happy ending (Interview with Nancy Garden, n.d.).

Nancy Garden currently lives with her wife Sandy Scott in Massachusetts and Maine (Interview with Nancy Garden, n.d.). She maintains a web site at www.nancygarden.com.

Genre: LGBTQ, Romance

Curriculum ties

Annie on My Mind provides great opportunities for students to explore three ways that oppression can function in our lives: internalized (Liza’s difficulty in accepting herself as lesbian), intrapersonal (the hostility that classmates express to Liza), and institutional (the school’s persecution of Liza and the two lesbian teachers who are unwittingly swept into the drama). The novel also provides rich materials for discussing the role of truth in resisting oppression. At several key points Liza lies as she tries to fend off the hostility closing in on her; do her lies help or hurt her in the short run and the long run?

Book-talking ideas

• Reading the lovely scene where Liza first encounters Annie singing in a gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likely to grab the attention of potential readers who are romantics and/or cosmopolitans.

• Although reading very much of the scene where Liza and Annie are busted in their teachers’ townhouse would reveal too much too early, perhaps some paragraphs could be read to capture the drama of that scene without revealing the outcome.

Reading level/interest age

Except for the end of the novel, when tension builds around the secret time in the townhouse, readers of Annie on My Mind must be inclined to enjoy a slowly developing romance, taking their pleasures in the New York City setting and the narrator’s thoughtful reflections on her experience rather than dramatic plot developments. Within those parameters, I think both middle school and high school students could access and appreciate most aspects of the story. Seven middle school libraries and 11 high school libraries in the San Francisco Unified School District own copies of Annie on My Mind.

Challenge issues

The lesbian theme is a lightning rod for some, of course, and Annie on My Mind was the center of a well-publicized censorship struggle in Kansas in the early 1990s (Nancy Garden, 2007). But the lack of explicit sex in the novel (as well as the lack of violence and profanity) might make it less of a target than some more recent works in this genre.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Remind the challenger of how important it is for everyone, and especially young people, to have access to stories that help them understand their own identity and the identity of the people around them.

Why I chose to read this book

Having read several stories about gay teenage boys, I wanted to read about lesbian experiences; several articles that survey this genre list Annie on My Mind as an early landmark.

References

Garden, N. (2009) Nancy Garden: Author, teacher, speaker. Retrieved November 27, 2009, from http://www.nancygarden.com/

Interview with Nancy Garden. (n.d.). TeensReadToo.com. Retrieved November 27, 2009, from http://www.teensreadtoo.com/InterviewGarden.html

Nancy Garden. (2007, October 2). authors4teens. Retrieved November 27, 2009, from http://www.authors4teens.com/introduction.jsp?authorid=ngarden