Carley Wells, the teenage protagonist of Tanya Egan Gibson’s debut How to Buy a Love of Reading (HTBALOR), begs her personal, hired novelist Bree McEnroy to drop the metafiction and “just tell her a story.” Already weary of the endless parties and shallow relationships of her wealthy Long Island neighborhood, she finds little comfort from postmodern intellectuals who revel in the supposed novelty of meaninglessness.

Gibson begins each section with both a literary term and a party invitation, thus comparing how both the very rich and the highly intellectual can lose themselves in overwrought fantasies. HTBALOR imagines its privileged world in exquisite, fanciful detail, complete with Medici-style sculptures of prominent citizens, private family homes with staffs of twenty-five or more, and brunches replete with food from every country – which no one touches in order to maintain their perfect figures. The highly creative description slows down the novel’s pace, reflecting a world where people survive by paying attention to every detail of how they appear to others, rather than thinking on their feet to meet their basic needs. Sometimes the pace becomes too slow and the layers of description too thick, and HTBALOR bogs down and gets hard to read, but if one perseveres through those sections, the moments of whimsy and poignancy return.

Reality does intervene, even in the lives of Fox Glen’s residents and the state’s literati: writers must sell books and land commissions to survive, and so their work must resonate with some aspect of the book-buying public’s psyche. The town’s pretty-boy comes down with colds and flus, people fall into ponds wearing all their fancy clothes, ice sculptures melt in embarrassing ways, and some people, including bored, overweight, lonely Carley, are not shiny and perfect.

To her parents’ shame, Carley obsesses over teen soap operas and reality shows, some of which are clever parodies of Survivor, Lost, and other actual programs. In one of Gibson’s gentle nods to human nature, HTBALOR never mocks Carley’s passion and suggests real reasons for the appeal of popular shows. Carley finds what she watches on TV more authentic than anything assigned and dissected in her English class. People in her favorite shows experience life directly, feeling all the emotions, without having to explain, analyze, or make obscure references. Also, the shows provide enough backstory to help viewers understand what’s going on, rather than staying opaque for effect.

Backstory, and the concept of memory and the past, play a central role in HTBALOR. Carley continually retreats to Aftermemory, a self-named place in her head where she relives events, imagining herself saying and doing the perfect things. This becomes her own personal space, a place where she can ‘choose her own adventures’ and claim some independence from her false friends and controlling family. Justin, Bree’s writer colleague and former lover, cannot win her back, despite his success, rock-star persona, and genuine caring, when she realizes that her past, and her present, identity resulted in part from his past deceptions. Like the character Glory in the teen drama Arion Annals, and like her own postmodern version of Odysseus, she’s lost her sense of who she is by losing her sense of her past.

Gibson also suggests why, even with our modern technologies and academic knowledge, we find ourselves looking for our cultural memories, going back to our oldest stories, re-making them over and over for different times and places. As Carley explains to Bree, with an insight beyond her sixteen years, many readers crave stories where good wins out in the end and people can rescue each other, even when matters would be more complex in real life. We long to identify with the characters as people rather than simple constructs, and to receive affirmation that there are things worth doing in the world. Like Carley, we want reminders that our efforts towards heroism and altruism are worthwhile, even when we do not succeed.

Through her characters’ experiences with various forms of story and narrative, Gibson satirizes through humorous exaggeration the ways people create elaborate means of hiding from themselves and each other. Still, through the characters’ efforts towards self-awareness, and through Carley’s eventual choice to claim personal autonomy in real life as well as her Aftermemory and embrace the book-project on her own terms, HTBALOR ultimately affirms the power of story to help us communicate, understand ourselves, and stay motivated to care for others. This is a book as much about finding (not buying!) the love of living and finding oneself in story, as much as about the love of reading – and appropriate for adults as well as mature teens.

Tanya Egan Gibson’s How to Buy a Love of Reading (Penguin Group, 2009) can be ordered through the website http://www.howtobuyaloveofreading.com, which includes stories from fans about how reading made a difference in their lives.