Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.

I'm surprised and disappointed in American culture.

Abstinence is a perversion.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.

I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.