“Sick Lit”
The genre and idea of “teen sick lit” has been around since the 1980s, with the Smithsonian magazine defining it in 2012 as a genre “awash with tear-jerking stories of ill adolescents who seek only to find the love of their life during their final days.” It’s a phrase that has become a derogatory label for this type of artistic work. Even the Smithsonian back in 2012 cautioning parents, saying that the genre’s penchant for using ill, white, middle-class women as vehicles for the growth of another character as well as its presumed promotion of negative stereotypes about those with illnesses should make parents “queasy.” This argument around the merits and values pops up every few years, with new takes on the genre and its failures. In a 2013 article from the Daily Mail, one thata subsequent article from the Guardian strongly disagreed with, points to popular examples like John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, Megan Bostic’s Never Eighteen, and Jenny Downham’s Before I Die as problematic for directly dealing with the “harsh realities of terminal illness, depression and death” in novels meant for young adults. The unfortunate reality is, as the Guardian’s Michelle Pauli notes, that these are issues that teens will have to face in their lives, whether directly or indirectly. Even as recently as 2019, Kelsey Miller, writing for Refinery 29, was still pondering the impact of so-called “sick lit” on her childhood. But while she asks some of the central ques-
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tions to the “sick lit” conversation—What are we getting from these harrowing stories? Do they help us grapple with our own mortality?—she lands on an unsettling answer that this type of story pushes painful emotional buttons without having the reader actually experience the pain of living that reality much in the same way that horror movies or haunted houses allow people to experience fear without any actual danger. With I and You, Gunderson bucks this conversation through the use of themes derived from Walt Whitman’s poetry. Much like Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the events and conversations of I and You transcend what can be experienced using the five senses. These two characters, more than anything, are characters who need each other. The journey they are on could easily be made about their pain or Caroline’s illness. Instead the play highlights two teenagers who let down their walls to confide in each other and trust each other. Ultimately, the transcendence of Gunderson’s play (and Whitman’s poem) is this mysterious human connection, that moment when two become one. A universal experience.
“And as to you Death, you bitter hug of mortality, It is idle to try to alarm me.” - Walt Whitman
