Award-Winning Author Offers Boys Insight on Identity

David Levithan, the winner of the Lambda Literary Award and editor of the Hunger Games, spoke to the Middle and Upper School boys, introducing his novel Everyday to foster discussion about the importance of a person’s identity and how it impacts their lives. 

“The whole book is about what life would be like if we weren’t defined by our bodies, and, by extension, our gender or race or parentage or other body-related facets of identity,” Mr. Levithan said. 

Levithan offered the boys a unique perspective on these identity related topics. 

Author David Levithan addresses the Upper School at an assembly about his novel, Everyday, Oct. 28, 2019. Levithan’s works have been praised for portraying positive LGBTQ student experiences. (Sankara Iwelu)

“Though the faculty try to implement talks on gender, race, and sexuality, we don’t really have much first-hand experience with most of these topics,” Xavier M. ’22 said. 

Mr. Levithan delivered both a commentary on his book and laid bare his feelings on the topics he addressed. 

“I wanted readers to experience life through the eyes of a person who wasn’t defined by a body, and to try to imagine what their lives would be like if their identity came entirely from who they were, not from the way other people saw them,” Mr. Levithan said. 

In Everyday, the main character, A, falls in love with a girl, Rhiannon. A is a person who switches bodies every morning and is never the same person twice. A has to act out that person’s life for a day in order to remain undetected. 

Mr. Levithan´s book opened up discussions about identity and stereotypes. His goal was to prompt the reader to think about the topic in a deep and meaningful way. 

“I wanted people to think about how [identity] is formed. Do we get to form it ourselves, or is it formed for us,” Mr. Levithan said. 

Dean of Student Life Sam Permutt, who oversees the structure of assemblies, is trying to incorporate more events such as these in order to make students feel more at ease. 

“We want all of our students to feel like they belong in this community and for them to feel like they know how to interact in a world that has a lot of different people with different perspectives,” Mr. Permutt said. “I think that being able to communicate across cultures is a very important skill that we want our students to have.”