Trouble Right Under Your Nose: My Friend Dahmer

     I feel that most people can relate to the narrator of this book. He is a normal high school kid who hangs out with his friends and has his jokes and lives an average, cush, white, 70's suburban middle-class lifestyle. Nothing too dramatic. As I said, he has his group of friends within a school teeming with students. Many of these students get overlooked. People tend to stay within their circles, and the loud ones are the ones that get the attention from the school staff.
     Dahmer is one of the students who gets overlooked. He does get some attention from the narrator and his friends, but it is really only as the but of their ongoing joke. They are not so much laughing with Dahmer as laughing at Dahmer. Sadly, this is the closest Dahmer seems to have gets when it comes to forging a friendship.
      That said, Dahmer also shows signs of a troubled teen. I suppose an emotional disorder would be the immediate label placed upon him if teenage Dahmer were in high school today. Clearly, however, there were also other, more dangerous thoughts and urges going through his brain. As the narrator notes, it is amazing that the school staff did not catch or act upon these signs of trouble which seemed to have been common knowledge within the student body. How could someone like this manage to slip through the cracks, so to speak?
       Thankfully, as the narrator also noted, schools today do a better job of keeping tabs on their students. This does not take away from the fact that it is very important to reach out to every kid so that there are not isolated and troubled individuals like Dahmer who won't receive the help that they clearly need. Yes, their lives may be lived under the influence of medication, but that is better than having someone like Dahmer acting out their dangerous fantasies. Also, this book also underlines the importance of parent involvement in their child's life, as well as the importance of communication between the parents and the school.
       I think that this book would be a surefire read for any reluctant reader. It is definitely an eccentric topic that will grab anyone's attention, the illustration is eye-catching, and the story underlines the need for people to look out for one another so that troubled, isolated individuals don't fall into a downward spiral of mental disturbance without any social safety nets. I am not sure if this story makes me feel sympathetic towards Dahmer, but it definitely makes me lament the circumstances that enabled him to eventually do the things that he would later do. I suppose this blog leans a little on the nuture side of the nature-nuture debate... which leads me to wonder what a memoir of the elementary school experience with Dahmer would be like. Hmm....