Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Deconstructing Crank
This is kind of in response to what Steve commented earlier about how the mother of the girl addicted to meth wrote Crank... which is something that I found really interesting. Right away this gave me a lot to think about in terms of deconstructing the text- the fact that we are getting the mother's perspective not only of how the drug is affecting the decisions that her daughter is making, but also of how she views her daughter both on and off the drugs. You can argue through the text how she is attempting to understand both her daughter's plight as a teenager by including small descriptions of how she perceives herself (i.e. "three zits a month", hormonal, etc), and also of her plight as a drug addict, and as a drug-addicted teenager. You could argue that each of these has a separate identity in the book but they are still not mutually exclusive of each other. All of these different things make this book a very interesting read and a good text to deconstruct in my opinion!
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I was interested in the author's perspective as well. I have never been under the influence of drugs, so I began trusting the main character when she told me how it felt. Then I stopped and thought is this believable? How would the mother know how it felt? In the end I decided to trust the main character and believe her experience because if I didn't the story would not be readable to me.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this as well. I researched more about the book after I finished it over the weekend and was surprised when I found out the author's daughter was addicted to drugs and was also a teenage mom. I wish I would have known this before because I think it would have changed my reading of the text. However, after I learned this, I went back through the book and tried to pull out certain situations in which I thought the author's own experiences were coming through.
ReplyDeleteI think that the author having experience with a situation like this is what made this book so good- it gave her first hand knowledge on certain aspects of this lifestyle.
I think the fact that the author's daughter actually was addicted to meth really gave something extra to this book. Although it is easy to say, "She is just the mom, she doesn't know what is going on in her daughter's head 100% of the time" I think that being her mother allowed her to see things that other, including her daughter, may not. It is easy to see that Kristina feels out of control when she is high but as the mother , Hopkins can see how the meth spun her whole life out of control. Additionally when I first started reading I was thinking that Kristina must get caught right away. I mean, people would have to be blind to not notice her complete shift in behavior, right? I think that knowing the situation made Hopkins a much more credible source for a story of drug addiction. Hopkins was really able to show, through the role of Kristina's mother, that even when someone who is extremely close to you is in trouble or putting them self in danger it is often hard to see it because you are blinded by your expectations of that person. In this case, Kristina's mother is so blinded by her expectations that her daughter is so perfect and so much smarter than drugs that she doesn't see her problem until it is far too late.
ReplyDeleteI agree 100% with what has been said above. Knowing that the author's daughter suffered from drug addiction forced me to read Crank in a completely different way than if some random individual decided to write about drug abuse. Although I did often wonder what the differences might have been if the book had been written by someone who had done drugs themselves. I would definitely be curious to see "Kristina's" perspective.
ReplyDeleteI also wondered how such strong drug abuse could occur in a household without the mother having any idea. The fact that a mother of a drug addict wrote Crank shows that the signs are not always as evident as people would like to think.