Rereading Alice: The Agony of Alice

Uh-oh, it's book one and I'm already crying

I’m rereading the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and recapping it here. The other posts in the series are for paid subscribers, but this one is free so you can get an idea of how wonderful Alice is.

The cover I read as a kid, and still how I picture Lester.

The summer between fifth and sixth grades, something happens to your mind.

As a writer, a question you get asked a lot is some variation of “What was your favorite book in childhood?” Sometimes it will be, “What book changed your life?” or “What book made you want to be a writer?” But for me, the answer is always the same: the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

If you ask a woman who’s roughly my age about Alice McKinley, then there’s a good chance she’s going to gasp and say, “I loved those books.” The Alice series, which started with The Agony of Alice (published in 1985) and continued up until Alice turns 60 in 2013’s Now I’ll Tell You Everything (there are also several prequels) is nothing short of beloved. The series is also frequently challenged and banned because of its matter-of-fact depictions of sexuality and puberty.

But I didn’t love the books because they were scandalous (although I did genuinely learn a lot from them). I loved them because they felt real. Alice was a very ordinary girl, and she’s constantly embarrassing herself. If you, like me, lived through the horror of a 90s/2000s childhood, then you could instantly relate to Alice. In the first chapter, she says that she wishes the people who saw her do embarrassing things would disappear—not die, just disappear forever so that no one would be left to keep a record of her most humiliating moments. I’ve had that thought many times.

When I discovered the Alice books, sometime around fourth or fifth grade, I couldn’t get enough. I’d get whatever installment was on the shelf at either the tiny Bellville library or the “big” Mansfield library, where the paperbacks lived on clear rotating shelves that I can see in my mind even now. It didn’t matter to me if I was reading them out of order (I’m still like this today…I’ll read a romance series in the wrong order! Sometimes even a mystery series! I don’t care!), or if I’d already read that book a few times. I read them over and over. And as I got older, into high school and college, when the new Alice book came out each summer I’d get it from the library and read it on the swing on my parents’ porch, catching up on Alice’s life as I flew through the book in one sitting. I even included the Alice books in one of my books—in Very Sincerely Yours, they’re Teddy’s favorite books, and Everett St. James reads them to understand her better.

My library copy isn’t as cool as the original cover I read, but you can see I flagged a lot of passages. This is a long post!

I’ve read The Agony of Alice once as an adult, but it was years ago, before I became a mom. Reading it now was almost painful because it instantly brought me back to adolescence, but also because it reminded me that those feelings are inside of me still. And not even all that deep inside, either! I am always embarrassed and I have always been like this. Part of this is social anxiety, part of this is that my job requires constantly being publicly vulnerable, and part of it is just who I am. The embarrassment that Alice feels is no longer as paralyzing as it was for me as a kid, but it’s still there.

So let’s get into what happens in this book, shall we? First off, The Agony of Alice is a perfect title. Right away, we know what we’re getting and Naylor doesn’t sugarcoat it. Being in sixth grade does often feel like agony.

Most writing advice will warn you that you have to hook the reader right away—readers are busy, they aren’t patient, and they need to get immediately sucked in or they’re going to put the book down. Often this is interpreted as “you need to start with action,” but here Naylor proves that you don’t. Maybe you need to start with a girl explaining all of the various humiliations that have befallen her, starting with a memory of eating crayons. Who among us is not occasionally visited by a humiliating memory from kindergarten?? That’s called relatability. Alice also tells us about the poem she wrote for her mailman and the time she played Tarzan with Donald Sheavers (“He was stupid and good-looking, and I liked him a lot”…Alice would honestly LOVE reading romance novels).

Alice thinks that the main reason she can’t stop embarrassing herself is that she doesn’t have a role model. She has her dad and her nineteen-year-old brother, Lester, but her mother died when Alice was little. I love Alice’s dad and Lester, but the two of them are not at all helpful to Alice as she’s entering puberty. When she asks Lester was a period is, he says, “a comma without a tail.” When she wants to get a pair of Levi’s to look like the cool girls in school, he takes her to the men’s department, gets her a pair of the smallest men’s jeans he can find, and acts flabbergasted when they’re huge on her (“Maybe you’ve got a strange body or something”). This dude literally doesn’t know that the girls’ department exists! How is Alice supposed to thrive in this environment???

I can’t fault her dad, who is clearly trying his best and still swimming in grief. He gets visibly upset when Alice can’t remember her mother and confuses her with Aunt Sally and he later describes himself as looking for a wife. He manages a music shop, The Melody Inn, that always sounded perfect to me as a kid. My whole life, I’ve remembered the merchandise they sold: notepads that say Chopin Liszt. I wish I could shop at the Melody Inn.

Anyway, while Alice is crying because there aren’t any Levi’s in the entire world that fit her because Lester is, as her dad puts it, “out to lunch,” a salesgirl comes over and directs her to the girls department. But when Alice visits the fitting room, she opens the wrong door and comes face to face with a red-haired boy in blue underpants. It’s…Patrick Long, but she doesn’t know that yet. But we do if we’ve read the whole series. I need to be honest with you guys and say that right now, at this moment in my Alice re-read journey, I’m not Patrick’s greatest fan. I don’t remember him being terrible, but I also don’t remember him being particularly great. So he traveled a lot. Big deal! I’m open to changing my mind later on, but Patrick is Alice’s on-and-off great love throughout the series, and this is an iconic introduction.

Alice is convinced that she needs a mother to be a role model and stop her from embarrassing herself (and also a mother would know not to shop for a pre-teen girl in the men’s department). Alice and her family have recently moved to Silver Springs, Maryland so her father could manage the Melody Inn (side note: I found the names of the towns in this book absolutely beautiful when I was a kid. Tacoma Park. Silver Springs. They sound so lovely!), so she’s starting sixth grade in a new school. The perfect time for a reinvention as someone who never ate crayons, never wrote a poem for the mailman, and never had a crush on a himbo named Donald. Alice knows that if she can only get the beautiful, glamorous Miss Cole as her teacher, she’ll learn all she ever needs to know about being a woman.

But she doesn’t get Miss Cole. She doesn’t even get the “cool” male teacher who takes the class on an overnight camping trip every year (sounds like a nightmare for that teacher, tbh). She gets…Mrs. Plotkin.

Alice hates Mrs. Plotkin immediately because she’s not beautiful. She’s frumpy. She’s also fat, which Alice spends a lot of time describing in ways that made me feel pretty bad (Alice is, of course, a child and she does grow and change a lot over the course of the book, but I don’t think a book written for children in 2023 would describe fat people in the terms used here). Alice tries to get expelled from Mrs. Plotkin’s class by lying and essentially being a jerk, but no dice. She’s stuck there.

But something happens as Alice stays in Mrs. Plotkin’s classroom. Even though she’s being, as previously mentioned, a total jerk (at one point when Mrs. Plotkin is reading to the class, Alice pretends to sleep and even snores??? I was cringing with so much second-hand embarrassment, which is kind of the feeling I have throughout this entire series), Mrs. Plotkin doesn’t stop reaching out to her. And Alice…starts to like Mrs. Plotkin, even staying after school to help clean the blackboard and organize the school supplies.

But then someone else horns in on Alice’s territory. Someone named…Pamela Jones.

Alice has two best friends throughout the series, and they’re both introduced here. Elizabeth Price lives across the street, is Catholic, and is kind of a goody-goody. She’s the Charlotte, you might say. Pamela has long blonde hair (until she gets daring pixie cut later on!) and is a little more wild. In other words, the Samantha. I don’t know what SATC character this makes Alice. Feel free to tell me if she’s a Carrie or a Miranda in the comments.

Pamela and Alice aren’t friends yet, though, and Alice is pissed because Pamela is angling to get Mrs. Plotkin to give her a cracked globe at the end of the school year. Honestly, this made me laugh and also felt so real. Alice doesn’t even care about that globe, but she knows Mrs. Plotkin is going to give it away so she wants it. And Pamela keeps being like, “Oh, I love learning about geography” while smiling smugly at Alice. Worst of all, she keeps hanging around Mrs. Plotkin’s room and organizing the school supplies before Alice can get to them, which sucks because Alice is the one who needs Mrs. Plotkin.

Mrs. Plotkin, though, is perhaps the greatest, most generous teacher ever created in fiction, and she knows what’s going through Alice’s head. “It seems that you’re angry at Pamela for wanting the very things you want. It’s not so horrible to want to be special, Alice.”

It’s not so horrible to want to be special. No one has ever so clearly distilled that feeling, that dark jealousy of wanting someone else to get away from what you want because you need it and they don’t.

“Mrs. Plotkin saw right through me,” Alice says. “She saw Alice McKinley at her worst, but she didn’t stop liking me.” And isn’t that the best gift we can give someone, or the best gift they can give us? Seeing them in their dark, petty moments and still loving the hopeful, lonely child inside.

But back to Patrick. When we last saw him, he was wearing blue underpants in a changing room. But do you think he was embarrassed that Alice saw him in a state of undress? Nope. Patrick is the opposite of Alice—not embarrassed by anything. When Alice gets an anonymous, kinda sexy valentine, we know who it must be from.

“It was one of those misty-looking photographs of a man and woman walking through the woods holding hands and you can’t see their faces. At the top, in curly letters, the words said, A SPECIAL FEELING WHEN I THINK OF YOU. I sat down on the bed.”

A special feeling? Wow. A bold claim. Alice does some truly hilarious detective work and finds out that the valentine came from Patrick (long story, but it involves correctly identifying the airplanes he drew), and then he throws her a candy bar at the crosswalk (he’s a crossing guard, of course) and then they’re boyfriend-girlfriend.

This isn’t just a book about Alice’s relationships with her teacher and her boyfriend, though. It’s also a book about…puberty! I’ve written before about how I learned a lot about the human body from Judy Blume’s books, but the Alice books were really my introduction to most things. The thing about Alice is that she’s curious and she’s not afraid to ask questions. In a later book, I clearly remember her asking everyone around her tons of questions about “intercourse.” But I relate! My family wasn’t super open about things like this when I was a kid, which was difficult for me as someone who is inherently nosy. I remember asking my parents all the time where babies came from, and all they would tell me was that first someone had to decide they wanted a baby. In my mind, that meant that if I ever had the thought that I wanted a baby, I might spontaneously become pregnant, which meant that I needed to firmly control my thoughts and avoid thinking anything that seemed positive about babies. I was in kindergarten. Perhaps we’re getting to the root of my anxiety!

Anyway, Alice gets her period when she’s visiting Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally is a real character. She lives in Chicago (which means that Alice gets to ride the train to visit her! Exciting!) and she’s…I don’t even know how to describe her. Kind of uptight? She wants the best for Alice, but she doesn’t really know what that is. Luckily for Alice, Aunt Sally is able to help her handle her first period. Can you even imagine what Lester would have done? He probably would have made Alice think she was dying. Aunt Sally also has a wonderfully glorious adult daughter named Carol, who I thought was so cool when I was a kid. She takes Alice shopping and shows her around Chicago. And when Alice gets back home, her dad and Lester are super awkward around her because of course Aunt Sally called and told them she got her period. When her dad asks her about it, she says, “I started my period. So what else is new?” An icon. This book is from 1985 and still so much of popular culture isn’t this frank about periods.

This is getting very long so I think it’s time to describe the part of the book that made me sob as I read it outside. Just me in my backyard, crying over a book. Nothing new!

Pamela gets that globe and Alice is pissed. “Part of me wanted to leave. Part of me wanted to clobber Pamela. But another part of me told me I loved Mrs. Plotkin for more than her globe. I stayed.”

That’s when Mrs. Plotkin starts telling Alice, “I don’t have any children of my own, you know…I don’t know if you want this or not, but…you see, my great-grandmother passed it down to her daughter, who passed it down to my mother, and I was supposed to give it to my daughter, which I never had…”

It’s a ring. Mrs. Plotkin gives Alice her family ring that’s been passed down from daughter to daughter, and she says, “I think my great-grandmother—she would have been your great-great-grandmother—would have been pleased to see who got this ring, Alice. I really do.”

The way she says it—your great-great-grandmother—just kills me. Alice so desperately wants a mother, and she finds this wonderful teacher who takes her as she is, sees her as a good and hurting kid even when she’s acting bad.

There’s so much I didn’t even cover—like Lester’s girlfriends! I love Lester’s girlfriends. And Lester in general, who is so weird and so annoying and so funny. But we’ll get into it all next time when we talk about Alice in Rapture, Sort Of, also known as the one where Alice goes to the beach and Pamela’s top comes off in the water.

Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber, and please comment below with your Alice memories. If you haven’t read them, wow, what a treat you have in front of you! I’ll be doing one of these a month, so let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to focus on. See you soon. xo