Fangirl Literary Elements

Young Adult Fiction

Current time - 2014-16 - at college in Nebraska

Third person narrator (the author) telling events from Cath's point of view

Coming-of-age novel with teen angst and genuine sadness or anger

Cath is the protagonist; antagonists are her absent mother, fellow fiction-writing student Nick, and her own quirks and mental idiosyncrasies

Cath and Wren stop speaking to each other over getting to know their mother and also over Wren's drinking.

Cath reads The Outsiders to Levi which brings them closer and closer until they finally kiss each other.

Wren's refusal to leave the bar with Cath and Levi when she is drunk foreshadows the escalation of her alcohol addiction and the alcohol poisoning that follows.

Cath's father tells her that he has slipped a little with regard to looking after himself which is a vast understatement as his emotional state has unravelled completely resulting in hospitalization.

There are many allusions referencing popular modern culture; for example Cath says that she cannot cut her hair like Wren's because "I couldn't Single White Female my own sister, an allusion to the film starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh in which Fonda's seemingly normal room-mate began stalking her, dressing like her and consuming her identity.
Similarly in chapter seven Levi tells Cath, "You're not the ugly one, you're just the Clark Kent", alluding to the character Superman who is a shy, unassuming man by day but when he takes off his glasses becomes a very attractive superhero whose physical beauty was not obvious at first.

Several times Levi brings Cath a personalized gingerbread latte which is warm and reassuring, like Levi; the coffee that he fetches her from the vending machine in the psychiatric hospital is stark and bland, and not at all reassuring. The coffee on both occasions is used to set the mood and feeling of the people drinking it.

Cath observes that it would be weird to their high school friends to see the twins apart but weird to their college friends to see them together. This shows the paradox between their "old" lives as children and their "new" lives as adults

The state of the fictional relationship between Simon and Baz parallels the state of any of Cath's relationships, as the way she feels about love and romance parallels the way in which she writes about it.

Cath's relationship with her fanfiction, meaning the intensity of her connection to an imaginary world, also takes an inverse parallel to her connection to reality. This progression is shown over the course of the novel, where as her connection to reality becomes more solid her connection to a fantasy world becomes weaker.

Professor Piper tells Cath that "the school" takes a dim view of plagiarism with "the school" representing the faculty and governors who write the rules and set the guidelines.

The hospital did not welcome visitors, so that the hospital personifies the attitudes of the staff at the psychiatric facility that Cath's father is admitted to.