Dear Readers,

This piece will include an open discussion of teen suicide and mental health in reference to events in the story. 

This is a trigger warning and Jennifer Niven, Random House Publishing, and Netflix had a responsibility to put one in the introduction of the book, All the Bright Places, and its film adaptation. Before I explain, let me say that I LIKED THE BOOK. I am not advocating for a blanket cancelling of All the Bright Places. I don't want it pulled from Netflix and I certainly don't want parents banning it from school libraries or struck off class reading lists.

Fundamentally, a trigger warning is giving a reader the right to choose whether they want to engage with possibly traumatizing content. When a story is being explicitly marketed to teenagers, I think it's good practice to garner their informed consent—spoilers be damned. Notice I didn't say there was a responsibility to not write about suicide. I don't want to protect teens from difficult topics, but I think it's worth shielding those who are not prepared to handle it. In any given audience, we cannot possibly know who is at risk for being traumatized, so letting readers judge for themselves after giving them a one sentence warning is the bare minimum. Because this... 

...is not acceptable. 

It is not acceptable because Jennifer Niven consulted with mental health experts and sensitivity readers to get the experience of depression and suicidal thoughts right, but didn't see how a trigger warning could possibly help real people who suffer from those issues. Again, not everyone picking up the book experiences depression, bipolar, or suicidal thoughts, but if this book is meant to be a realistic representation of mental illness, maybe it shouldn't come at the expense of a reader's actual mental health. 

It's also a little gauche to pat yourself on the back for championing good mental health representation, but not similarly represent the care and treatment of mental health. But more on that later.

For now let's start with the positives.

1. The book was better than the movie.

Yes, it was one of those. 

Real quick here: All the Bright Places is a story about teenagers Violet and Finch bonding over a travel assignment to visit interesting and unusual sights around their home state of Indiana. It's through these discoveries of the unique and unremarkable that a romance blossoms between them, as well as their relationship with their respective mental illnesses: Violet with depression after the death of her sister and Finch with what is recognizably bipolar 2 disorder. They meet both contemplating suicide at the start of the story and by the end of the book Finch unfortunately dies from suicide.

This is the very bare bones of the story and main plot. The characters are not just their illnesses, but two well textured individuals who have complex relationships with their (albeit largely absent) parents and who both have clear motivations for how they publicly present themselves, especially at school. They also had a totally believable love story. The clear advantage of YA love stories is that you blame the stupidity of them on the fact it's teenagers that are stupid, not really the romance itself.

I was a sucker for the book because Violet is a book-ish writer mentally editing her mundane experiences into witty observations and Finch was caught up in a wanderlust, compelled to outrun his ennui by seeking novel experiences and brittle under his charisma. They were perfectly relatable main characters for me. I have kept multiple hand written travel journals. I take polaroids and squirrel away tourism brochures. I have loved strolling around a waterfall three miles from my house just as much as going on a boat tour in Zurich. If the drama for this book was set mostly in their high school instead of traveling around Indiana, I probably wouldn't have flown through reading it. Especially with a teenaged romance, you need a backdrop to frame their revelations of themselves and each other. 

I watched the movie first because it was my turn to pick a book for book club and the movie was on Netflix and I wanted to see if it would be good fodder for a big book versus film debate. I polled my book club on whether they wanted to be subjected to my All the Bright Places film rant and they declined for a chance to instead hear me gush about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, so my rant has instead been preserved for posterity here. 

I liked Elle Fanning and Justice Smith. They embodied and acted the characters wonderfully, Fanning with her willowy delicateness and Smith with his rambunctious energy that took up all the onscreen attention. But they were just too old. You know the best way to portray the fragility of youth? Hire actual teenagers and not twenty year olds. 

Highlights of the movie however were the Indiana Insta-worthy travel porn and Fanning's masterfully done scene where she retells what she remembers of the car accident with her sister. For all the restrained sadness before, they gush from her as the trauma of the accident is forced from her as she sits in a car for the first time since that night. In the book her talking about the accident reinforces how leeched her soul is of feeling. It was a powerful visualization of Violet's grief. 

Much like how I felt about the adaptation of John Green's, Fault in Our Stars, while inner monologues are obnoxious onscreen and movies are almost always right in omitting them, it robs the characters of their inner complexity we gain from the book version. Movies are also always truncated in their telling, meaning we never get to spend as much time developing the plot or romance. Violet is a more sympathetic character in the book because there's only so much sadness you can outwardly emote onscreen, hence why when she does cry, it's extremely cathartic. In fact, the tragedy of depression is often we can't see that person's inner pain. We feel her pain in the book. In the movie because we just see Violet falling in love with Finch when he's happy and being angry with him when he's suddenly on a low, it feels a lot she's centering her pain over his. She comes off as being angry that he's not paying as much attention to her. In the film it plays out as very accusatory, like, 'What's wrong with you? You're an asshole for not texting,'  whereas in the book she realizes something is wrong with Finch and is trying her best and you can empathize with her helplessness and it comes after a long burn of things becoming worse and worse. It is incredibly hard to know someone you love is going through something that you can't really help with. While there are absolutely ways to support a friend with mental illness, it necessitates a collaborative, ongoing effort. And on that note...

2. All the Bright Places wasn't bad sicklit, but it wasn't super great either

Having a mental illness doesn't make you more interesting, more complex a person, or more deep and we really, really need to kill that trope. When Violet is asked what she's most fears, she answers, "Being ordinary." Which I thought was a little out of place given the rest of the novel? Like Finch is struggling so hard to even function and Violet desperately wants to return to a time before when her family was whole and happy, but still we get this, "I don't want to be like other girls," BS and some John Green-esque, "I don't want to live an unremarkable life."

Gabe Dun speaks extensively about bipolar 2. When you boil down one of their stories from a manic episode, it seems edgy and cool that they dropped everything and went on a trip to Europe. But as their Bad with Money book reveals, they were incurring debt, had no plan, sometimes had no means to feed themselves and was wracked with anxiety the whole time. The book was actually really good at portraying the charade of acting normal for people.

It definitely didn't portray mental illness as a picnic. It was sad. Painful. At times so real it brought me back to being 16, alone in my room and desperate for relief, reading the ingredients on pill bottles before becoming resigned to putting them back in the cabinet because I Googled it and it wouldn't work. And the suicide was harrowing even if it occurred offscreen because we could feel Violet's growing dread as Finch's silence became more and more finite. But there is another audience who is reading this book. Teens who don't struggle with mental illness and fall in love with the story and romance. I think it's too easy to have a positive association with the book and its characters when the book and movie wasn't actually particularly good about mental health issues outside its depiction. It's a subtle reframing, but what needed to be emphasized was that it wasn't love that was alleviating their pain, it was having someone to open up to and listen. To be seen and heard.

I'm so hard on this novel because it does a rare thing. It gives voice and provides a perspective on a marginalized group that can connect readers to a real world issue. But that gift is squandered when it's not handled right. 

1. It bears being repeated, All the Bright Places needs a trigger warning.

2. A loving, romantic relationship is not a cure for depression or mental illness. All the Bright Places hardly ever engages with conventional forms of treatment. It depicts counselors and group therapy as useless, an official diagnosis as something to be avoided at all costs, the parents as not particularly involved or helpful resources, and medication only mentioned as a method of suicide. It would be different if the story did the work of addressing any of these problems directly. In the movie, Finch being Black might have been a good opportunity to confront the stigmatization of mental health services by the Black community. The mistrust for their counselors could have been caused by the lack of trained mental health professionals in public schools. That mental health services are inaccessible to most people, parents are often uninformed, and that it takes a lot of trial and error to find the right combination of traditional talk and drug therapy that works are issues that this book might inspire discussion about after reading it, but are basically ignored by the actual text in favor of portraying their relationship as the only thing that is working to make them feel better. This is a toxic trope that absolutely needs to die in a hole. Yes, those afflicted with mental health issues need to be reassured that they are still loved in spite of the difficulties and should be supported. That absolutely doesn't mean loving someone enough will "fix" them. Having a loving and supporting partner certainly helps, but waiting to be rescued isn't helpful. Let's normalize seeking out mental health resources or helping our loved ones find those resources. Ultimately recovery and treatment weren't what this particular story was about, but we deserve better and more complex stories about mental health. 

3. Pretty protagonists make their mental health problems more attractive. But the truth is that mental health is anything but. Hello Future Me also points this out, but sanitizing mental health issues to Violet's depression making her beautifully damaged and Finch's bipolar making him an eccentric bad boy takes away their complexities as characters and reduces the gravity of their mental health issues. I will say that in the book, it is handled a lot better. The lethargy of depression and disinterest in formally enjoyed activities. The frustration at trying to seize a little joy from running or driving or writing, but for your brain chemicals to betray you. Even the movie actually nails the highs of hypomania, but mental health should not be used as just a story advice to portray conflict and drama, like an exotic flavoring to high schoolers just being mopey. In the end, while All the Bright Places was a fairly good depiction of bipolar and depression in fiction and media, it didn't really say anything. It didn't bring to light or add to the discourse surrounding mental health issues. I do believe this was the author's honest telling of what it felt like to be someone who experienced a loss from suicide. It was very genuine and the writing was extremely poignant. But besides learning to find joy in life there wasn't any major takeaways from the story, especially regarding bipolar disorder.     

What is a writer's responsibility when portraying mental illness?

A writer's primary job is to write well. It is not a fiction writer's job to fix or even provide commentary on a social issue. Those are usually just byproducts of the writing. But. When a writer is marketing specifically to a teen audience, there's a responsibility to take better care. If this was in the adult fiction section, I wouldn't have half the criticisms I've listed because adults have a greater access to resources and the life experience to temper unrealistic expectations. It's why we're hyper critical of Disney films or the language used on cable news to report a suicide. These will become the formative influences for how teens think about mental illness. If this is a teenager's first exposure to bipolar, links to a couple websites in the back is not enough. It's not enough to portray mental illness sympathetically or humanize people suffering from mental illness. Not when bad tropes continue to get perpetuated just for the sake of an interesting story.

It was a good book, but it could be so much better and a YA author has the responsibility to do better. 

Conclusion: 4/5

All the Bright Things was a good story. Not particularly problematic, but definitely flawed, but not enough that I didn't enjoy the story and saw its value for its portrayal of bipolar and depression. I would absolutely recommend it with the HUGE caveat of it requiring a trigger warning for suicide. 

But.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green was a better YA novel that depicted OCD. 

And if you are curious about better portrayals of bipolar, Ellen Forney published two graphic novels about her experience after being diagnosed with bipolar and all the tips and tricks she learned for coping with it.