46 pages • 1 hour read
Jenny HanP.S. I Still Love You
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Letting Go of Childhood
Lara Jean has had the same group of friends since middle school, and while there are now many rifts and rivalries between them, they still all think of themselves as a group. Even Genevieve—once Lara Jean’s best friend, and now her arch enemy—attends Lara Jean’s reunion party at the treehouse where they all used to gather. She may do this partly to gall Lara Jean, who has not invited her, and partly to show off her closeness to Peter, Lara Jean’s new boyfriend. It also seems likely that something in Genevieve yearns for the closeness and security of her old social circle, even while she seems to be doing her best to disrupt it.
The main cause of all the new divisions in the group is sexual rivalry and the advent of sex in general. There is Genevieve’s rivalry with Lara Jean, and Peter and John’s underground rivalry with one another. Lara Jean feels uncertain about Peter partly because she knows him to be more sexually experienced than she is, which makes him seem slightly dark and untrustworthy to her, even though he is careful not to pressure her for sex. Lara Jean is also put off by the aggressive sexuality of her friend Chris, who is also Genevieve’s cousin. Chris is kinder and more loyal than Genevieve, but she shares her cousin’s flashy style and hard, frivolous demeanor. This similarity may be one reason why the two cousins do not get along; it is the sort of similarity that tends to fuel competitiveness, rather than closeness.
Lara Jean’s old group of friends want to remain a group, even if it is a different, looser group than before. One way in which they try to reconcile their old closeness with their growing separateness is by playing the game “Assassin,” which they all used to play in middle school. It is a game that is nostalgic for them, but it also serves as a kind of rite of passage. As high schoolers with cars, they are able to play the game in a more committed and serious way than they did as middle schoolers. Their desire to win the game is also more serious this time, fueled as it is by underground resentments and scores to settle. Lara Jean, for example, is galled by Genevieve’s remark that she “just doesn’t have the killer instinct” (208); she correctly intimates that Genevieve is talking about a lot more than her ability to win the game. She sets out to prove Genevieve wrong and also to find out what exactly Genevieve has been hiding: her mysterious family problems that have kept Peter so infuriatingly beholden to her.
What Lara Jean finds out about Genevieve—that her father is conducting an open affair with a girl close to her own age—is disturbing and humbling, a new kind of adult knowledge. She finds this out at the same moment that she wins the game, and the knowledge serves to compromise her victory: to make it seem petty and childish, when a moment before it had seemed important. The whole scene is a succinct example of what a volatile in-between time adolescence can be: a brand of turbulence that Lara Jean and her friends all must learn to navigate, separately and together.
Dating and Social Media
As a millennial teenager, Lara Jean is accustomed to social media and must learn how to navigate it in her dating life. Social media can serve to expose intimacies for the purposes of public shaming; it can also serve to keep illicit intimacies secret. Lara Jean is humiliated and angry when an anonymous poster shares a video of herself and Peter in a hot tub: a video made at a time before she and Peter were even an official couple and shared at a time when she and Peter have just begun to date. She is just as frustrated, although in a quieter way, by Peter’s constant surreptitious texting while the two of them are together. She suspects that he is texting with his ex-girlfriend Genevieve, and the texts seem to be just as much of an invasion of her and Peter’s privacy as does the anonymous posted video. While Lara Jean can at least talk openly with Peter about the video, however, etiquette prevents her from asking him about the texting in most cases.
One contradictory aspect of social media—an aspect that makes it especially confusing in regard to dating—is that it is fleeting and ephemeral but can have serious, long-lasting consequences. Lara Jean worries that the hot tub video will sabotage her future in various ways, such as her chances of getting into a good college, her chances of future employment. The more serious people around her, such as her father and Margot, fuel these worries. At the same time, as her less serious friend Chris reassures her, video scandals have a short shelf life. There are always new scandals and new videos, and social media has made people’s attention spans, as well as their capacity for outrage, increasingly feeble. Chris predicts correctly that Lara Jean’s hot tub video (even before it is eventually removed) will be supplanted by a different school scandal within a week.
Social media can take the uncertainty inherent in any new romance—the delicate question of whether the romance will last—and both magnify it and flatten it out. It can suggest dire permanence and seriousness at one moment and can seem as fleeting as a text message at the next. Since adolescent feelings are volatile already, moreover, social media can be an especially destructive tool in teenagers’ hands: They are apt both to wield it and to be especially hurt by it. It is little surprise that Lara Jean, who is drawn to old-fashioned rituals, should find solace in the letters that she and John exchange. While these handwritten postal letters seem staid and decorous compared to texting, the safe distance that the letters establish allows John and Lara Jean to be more open and unguarded with one another than they might be otherwise. Lara Jean confesses to John in an early letter about her habit of writing secret love letters to boys in middle school: a confession that she has never made to Peter, even though he is her actual boyfriend. John, in turn, tells Lara Jean that he is disappointed to hear that he was not the only boy she liked.
The Attraction of Ritual and Tradition
Lara Jean is a modern, millennial teenager in many ways, acclimated to texting with her friends and to watching pet videos with her younger sister Kitty. Still, she is also drawn to tradition and ceremony, whether it is assisting in a PTA-sponsored cakewalk at her old school or organizing a USO-themed cocktail party at a local retirement home. She enjoys baking elaborate cakes and planning birthday slumber parties and Valentine’s Day surprises. Talking with her friend Stormy, a patient at the retirement home, makes her wish that she could date in the 1950s, a time when the boundaries between casual and serious romance seemed more set: when you were either pinned to one boy, or dating a lot of different boys at once.
Genevieve, Lara Jean’s former best friend, views Lara Jean’s love of old-fashioned ritual as a form of hypocrisy, calling it “your whole sugary sweet routine” (330). She sees Lara Jean as adopting an outwardly prim, girlish demeanor so that she can get away with behaving in the same underhanded way that Genevieve does. While this is an overly jaundiced, cynical view, there is an element of truth in it. Lara Jean’s attraction to ritual is a way not so much of hiding her contradictions as it is a way of managing them. She finds comfort in formality and elaborate ritual partly because it is communal and connects her—as a motherless Korean American—to her past and to her family. There is also a way in which the strictness and the complexity of these rituals serves to make her own swirling complicated inner life less alien and unnavigable.
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By Jenny Han
