Explore the significance of growing up in this extract.
Remember to include in your answer detailed analysis of the
way that Hornby shapes meaning. Hornby begins the extract describing the feelings he has towards breakups at his current age. He appears to be talking to a recent ex of his telling her that they are now too old for their break up to have made either one of them miserable. This shows the audience that he is now mature enough to know how to handle break-ups, and allows him to compare that attitude with how he handled the same situations as a child. The main emotions stereotypically associated with a split-up would be melancholy and grief; when discussing him feeling these emotions as a child, the author tells us how they really meant something back then an indication to the reader that unhappiness has become a norm for him, and is no longer an emotion only to be felt in times of distress. This indicates to us that in growing up, his rose-tinted view on the world has gone, and there is a lot more sorrow in life than he previously thought. Furthermore, he emphasises this point by using a simile to compare this depression with a cold. As a child with a cold we would be off school, being cared for by a parent and getting sympathy, whereas as an adult it is simply something that everyone has and it just has to be dealt with. When looking back on his favourite childhood pastime of only allowing himself to play on park items if he could find a danger in their use, he recognises what I later understood to be irony. This shows the reader that as an infant he was unaware of the ironic nature of his acts but as he has matured he has gained perspective and is able to look back and realise this. Another indication to his growing up and the changes that avail comes when he begins to notice girls more; he describes them as one moment they werent thereand the next you couldnt miss them thus inferring how fast he changed both mentally and biologically as he hit puberty and began to develop an interest in the opposite sex. Moreover, this fast change left him and his peers confused when it came to these feelings they didnt know what they wanted from the girls. By using a plural Hornby indicated that the puberty process was one approached with friends rather than family (of whom he would most likely approach with any problems as an adult) as it was an awkward subject matter, again inferring his uncertainty at that point in his life. This ineptitude is brought to life in an anecdote which makes the reader feel more personal. He tells us of his first relationship with a girl called Alison Ashworth of whom he experienced his first kiss. He asks What did I think I was doing? and What did she think she was doing? using lots of rhetorical questions when reflecting on this event showing his
embarrassment as he is almost looking back in shame or disconcertion,
trying to justify his action to himself. We then get brought onto a later encounter with girls, at which we can tell he has had some time to develop his thought on girls and hone in his emotions towards them with his sexual desires growing as he did. He tells us how although she was a lovely girl, her kindness didnt interest him and his desires were for just breasts. This shows the audience that looking back he can see that she was in actual fact a very nice girl, but at that stage in puberty his hormones took over and seeing as she would not let him touch her breasts, he no longer cared for this girl and simply broke up with her. Furthermore, his maturity from that obsession with only wanting a girlfriend to fulfil his sexual needs is emphasised to the reader when he tells us that he would have found her attractive if they had met at another stage in his life. The extract ends with him showing how much he has grown up now as he is able to distinguish the attitudes teenagers had towards relationships differed amongst genders. This is a skill of which as a youth himself he would not have possessed - as he is portrayed to have been rather selfcentred when he breaks up with a girl because she wasnt ready to have sex but rather a quality he must have gained via maturing into an adult, in which you need to understand and take into account the feelings of others.
A Feminist Reading of The Fluidity of Gender Roles and The Ramifications of This in Bram Stoker's Dracula (Stoker, 1897) and Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire (Rice, 1976)