What I like the most about a coming-of-age story is to see the growing up process of a human being. Exactly what I found in the book-turned-movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

So here it goes: the movie got me, the characters grew inside me, the plot inspired me, and so I had to read the book that is written by the movie director himself, Stephen Chbosky. How perfect is that? To direct the movie that is adapted from your very own book? No wonder the movie has all the fragileness and anxieties that is nicely depicted in the book.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an epistolary novel, telling us the story of Charlie Kelmeckis, a boy teenager resided in the 1980s version of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Between the reading assignments, the new-built friendships, the sweet first love, the worship of mix cassettes, the unending nuance of Come On Eileen, the bizarreness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Charlie found himself trying hard to fit in, to participate, to lessen his anxieties.

But Charlie’s mental problem is more than what it shows, it’s just a tip of an iceberg—ready to emerge at any given moment, well, I don’t know, in a moment of a big change in a relationship for example, or a graduation that leads to a separation, which are all the unavoidable big parts of life, which are parts of Charlie’s life, something that Charlie has to face.

There’s a reason for a wallflower to stand still, to watch and observe, eager to connect but choose to be silent instead. For maybe the wallflower knows that every meeting has an end. And an ending could lead to a chaos. And a chaos is not something every flower could withstand.

I read the book about 3 times and watched the movie around 4 or 5 times. It is that addictive. Open for further discussion. Leave a comment and I will talk.