Why Are MCS BOE Members Lying About What Is in the Books They Are Banning?
The fish tale some are telling about 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl' is a doozy.
Gentle readers, sadly it falls on us to inform you that some of your Marietta City Schools Board of Education members have gone out of their way to lie to you about what is in the books they are banning. We know. Given the semester we’ve endured so far, we weren’t surprised either.
This time it’s the book Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews which the BOE had removed from the Marietta High School Library at the same time they removed Flamer. Earl, as we affectionately call the book at Marietta in the Middle, is the story of a high school senior named Greg and his filmmaking partner Earl who befriend, at the insistence of Greg’s mom, a girl at their school. A girl, dear reader, diagnosed with cancer.
While Greg is the narrator, Earl is the one whose foul mouth gets the book in trouble with the book banning brigade. There is one crass passage that is three pages long and repeats the word—trigger warning!, folks, we know this is a tough one—pussy several times. That’s right, Marietta, the word your grandpa used to refer to his tomcat, the word you heard incessantly all through middle and high school: Pussy is the culprit this time.
Ward 4 school board member Jaillene Hunter would have you believe that passage is, in her words to the MDJ, “a how-to guide on eating pussy.” Many photos that float around parent circles drumming up outrage against this book leave out the part of the passage where the boys start riffing on condiments. You read that right—not condoms—condiments! Honey mustard. Heinz 57. Grey Poupon. Hellmann’s. This brief sequence in Earl is clearly a joke, far from the “how-to guide” Hunter claims it is.
Ward 5 school board member Angela Orange declared to the MDJ that this passage is “beyond the pale,” whatever that means. Marietta in the Middle wonders how she squares the circle that this passage is inappropriate therefore Earl must be banned but The Color Purple is not inappropriate and can stay on MHS media center shelves. It’s a head-scratcher for sure.
This is the passage in question, and in the photos, we’ve included two pages before the passage and two pages after for better context.
“Hey, Earl, I can’t watch Alphaville today.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I’m sorry, man, I have to hang out with this girl from, uh – this girl from synagogue.”
“Wha-a-at.”
“She’s–”
“Are you going to eat her pussy?”
Earl can be sort of profane sometimes. He’s actually mellowed out a lot since his middle school days, believe it or not. Back in middle school he would have asked this in a much more violent and horrible way.
“Yeah, Earl, I’m going to eat her pussy.”
“Heh.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you even know how to eat pussy?”
“Uh, not really.”
“Papa Gaines never sat you down, said, Son, one day you’re gonna have to eat the pussy.”
“No. But he did teach me how to eat a butthole.”
When Earl is in full-on Gross-Out Mode, you have to play along or you’ll feel stupid.”
“God bless that man.”
“Yup.”
“I would teach you some pussy-eating technique, but it’s a little complicated.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I would need some diagrams and whatnot.”
“Well, tonight maybe you can draw some up.”
“Son, I don’t have time for that. I got like twenty pussies over here that I need to eat.”
“Is that right.”
“I’m on a pussy deadline.”
“You’ve got twenty vaginas, all lined up in a row.”
“Aw, what the hell. What the hell. No one’s talkin bout vaginas, Greg, what the hell is wrong with you. Man, that’s nasty.”
Earl likes to mix it up sometimes by pretending that you’re being gross and he is not, when he’s clearly being much grosser. This is a classic humor move that he has perfected over the years.
“Oh, sorry.”
“Man, you’re sick. You’re perverted.”
“Yeah, that was really out of line.”
“I’m talkin bout pussy. I got a little honey mustard over here, a little Heinz 57, and a whole lotta pussy.”
“Yeah, that’s not gross. What I said was gross, but not what you just said.”
“Got some Grey Poupon up in this. Got some Hellmann’s.”
Gross-Out Mode can last indefinitely and sometimes you just have to change the subject without warning if you actually have a message to convey.
Jesse Andrews, author of Earl, had this to say about banning his book and this passage.
But my book is sort of a different case. It seems to have been banned mainly because there’s a lot of swearing and a two-page passage where the main character and his only friend do a long jokey riff about eating pussy. (They’re both straight cisgender boys, one white, one Black.) The riff makes it pretty clear they’ve never eaten pussy, nor are they going to in the foreseeable future. I can’t stress this enough: these boys have never had sex. They’re just trying to make each other laugh by being gross and over-the-top. If you have ever known or been a teenager, you are probably familiar with this phenomenon.
Why do critics of this book misrepresent what’s in it? Why are MCS BOE members willfully lying about this book? That’s easy: A. The truth doesn’t fit their narrative, and B. They haven’t read it.
Is the language crude? Yes. And that doesn’t negate the fact this book is engaging and funny to read and one many high school students have enjoyed over the years. Greg hates when Earl goes into “Gross Out Mode,” but it’s one of those things Earl has to get out of his system from time to time. We are talking literally three pages of content, taken out of context, in a 295 page book. This is the point where we’d remind you, this is the way some kids talk, but dear reader, it’s not the kids who recently brought the word pussy to the mainstream vernacular.
Based on the fact the right wing talking points about this book come straight out of Mom’s for Liberty propaganda, we would surmise that the Venn diagram of people who object to this book being in the MHS library and people who enthusiastically voted for President Grab ‘Em By the Pussy is pretty near to a perfect circle.
The Marietta community can’t count on our elected school board members to tell us the truth about what content is in the books they are banning. We here at Marietta in the Middle suggest you check out the books for yourself and make up your own mind. We’ve discovered some hidden gems we’d never have known about had the school board not declared them unfit to read—without bothering to consult the students they serve or reading the books themselves, of course.
If you really do think this book doesn’t belong in the school library, what are your thoughts on The Color Purple? We discussed that potentially problematic book in detail here. Dear reader, it has much more colorful and shocking uses of the word pussy, and the MCS BOE insists they want to keep that one in the MHS library.
MHS parent, Jenny Storino, filed a challenge to the removal of Earl in early November, and MCS Superintendent Dr. Grant Rivera, who has been compelled by the MCS BOE to remove media center books via their September Directive to the Superintendent, upheld Earl’s removal. Storino filed an appeal to the BOE on November 29, 2023. The BOE has 30 days to vote on whether to accept the appeal or to remove Earl from the MHS library and have it join Flamer on their permanently banned book list, a list we at Marietta in the Middle expect to continue to grow as long as the September Directive is in place. What are the odds, dear reader, that the Board votes to “support the superintendent’s decision making” after forcing him to ban Earl in the first place? Taking bets in December!
When I read through this book even though sex is addressed in the context of someone saying something sexual from a state of ignorance, it became apparent two of the main characters are Jewish. It appears to have been banned because of that.