But they’re authentic and recognize Charlie as one of their own.Īt the end of the year, faced with losing his only two friends as they are graduating, Charlie pines after Sam, who eventually shows him affection back. The seniors unlock Charlie’s potential by welcoming him into their group of “others,” which they refer to as “wallflowers.” Neither of them are “cool” by any metric, because they refuse to play the popularity game that overshadows most high school experiences. Patrick is gay and secretly dating a football player. Bill assigns him books and reports outside the scope of the class, and Charlie devours them all.Īlong the way, Charlie befriends two upperclassmen - stepsiblings Patrick and Sam. Thanks to a caring English teacher who insists Charlie call him Bill, Charlie leans into a passion for reading. Crippled with the weight of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, Charlie also battles with a couple of dark events in his past: the suicide of his only friend Michael and the death of his favorite aunt Helen.
We gather immediately from his letters written to an unknown recipient that Charlie is a very observant teenager - literally a wallflower who watches everything from the sidelines. Styled as an epistolary novel - that is, consisting of a series of letters - the story follows Charlie, an introverted kid starting his freshman year of high school sometime in the 1990s. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of those books you read and feel the weight of each printed word. More recently, Chbosky directed the coming-of-age musical film Dear Evan Hansen. It was an immediate success with teenage readers, who found his raw, unvarnished writing style refreshing, albeit melancholic.Īfter Wallflower, Chbosky returned to the film and television world, ultimately writing and directing the film adaptation of his debut novel in 2012, as well as spearheading several other popular works.
The novel became The Perks of Being a Wallflower, published by MTV Books in 1999. He had written the line, “I guess that’s just one of the perks of being a wallflower,” and suddenly realized that “somewhere in that was the kid I was really trying to find.” Trained as a screenwriter, Chbosky began working on what he called a “very different type of book” in 1994. After graduating from the University of Southern California Filmic Writing screenwriting program, Chbosky wrote, directed and acted in the 1995 independent film The Four Corners of Nowhere, which was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival. Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 debut novel, ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower.’ Courtesy photo.Īmerican writer and director Stephen Chbosky has only penned two novels in his career, each separated by two decades.
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