There’s no real substitute for living through the indie-grunge scene of the early 2000s, but reading Benny Peterson’s beautifully illustrated and delightfully queer new novel, The Maidenheads—out now from Penguin Random House—is perhaps as close as you can get to actually running wild and free through the very specific world of D.C. punk.
For the latest installment of Vogue’s Required Reading series, Peterson opened up about the fellow writers whose work most makes them want to write, from Carrie Brownstein to Andrea Lawlor to Raven Leilani. Below, Peterson walks through their various inspirations for The Maidenheads below.
Girl by Blake Nelson
Girl, first published in 1994, tells the story of Andrea Marr, a lonely suburban teenager in the Pacific Northwest who drifts into the burgeoning punk scene in Portland, where she finds community and a complicated first romance with a charismatic singer. I must’ve read it a dozen times in high school, when I was also a lonely suburban teenager hungry for community, baffled by my own sexuality, dreaming of being swept off my feet by a sultry, tortured musician. This book is imprinted on my psyche forever (as will be clear to anyone who reads The Maidenheads having read and loved Girl thirty years ago), and I dream of achieving its raw, visceral immediacy.
Celine by Brock Cole
Another novel I read in high school that changed me forever—also, just as a note, another brilliant ’90s (technically, 1989) novel about girlhood written by a man! The eponymous heroine of Celine is an artist and queer-coded weirdo; the novel is plotless and fairly low-stakes, just Celine wandering through life and observing things. What stuck with me most (beyond one nightmare-fuel scene where Celine’s friend vomits into her own sweatshirt at a party) was how seriously Celine takes her art. At no point does she doubt herself; her identity as an artist is the most fixed thing about her. I found this somewhat shocking as a young person who was full of doubt, and I thought about it (both artistic self-doubt and the lack of it, as experienced by teenage girls) as I conceptualized the two main characters in The Maidenheads.
