No One is Perfect

I have always enjoyed reading. As a child, and even now, I would read anything I could get my hands on, from mystery, to romance, to fantasy. However, the book series that always stood out the most to me in my younger years and the one that I always read was Nancy Drew. I would read Nancy Drew after Nancy Drew until I had exhausted all the books at my school library and the local public library, from the original series published in the 1930s and all the way to a newer graphic novel series. I was hooked! I just couldn’t get enough of Nancy, her best friends Bess and George, and her sweetheart Ned.

I truly loved reading about how she solved mysteries and how she escaped from the perilous situations she invariably got herself into while chasing her culprits. You know, situations like being kidnapped or tied up in a basement or even being trapped in a hollow statute by the very smuggling villains she was trying to catch. She always found her way out and she always got her man.

She had perfect friends, a job she loved, a great boyfriend, a perfect and supportive dad, and a brilliant mind. She had an all-around wonderful life—aside from the occasional kidnapping and death threat. That’s quite the image for a ten-year-old girl to live up to.

Do not understand me, Nancy is a great role model, she was smart, kind, intelligent and courteous—and I do mean courteous! You would never find Nancy Drew speaking poorly of even the worst of the worst crook. She was and is a fantastic, well-rounded character. However, she was so absolutely wonderful, she seemed perfect—and perfection is not achievable in the real world like it might seem in fiction.

For the longest time, I wondered if I would ever be as good as Nancy Drew, if I could ever find friends as wonderful, a job as exciting, a life as fulfilling and wonderful as hers. As I went into my teen years, I began to collect the books from the original series—the ones that were published in the 1930s—and as I re-read them, I began to notice something that I had overlooked before. Nancy Drew messed up, and frequently!

She would occasionally forget to put gas in her lovely blue convertible which lead to the villain getting away, she would forget her pen light or batteries for her pen light which would mean she overlooked a vital clue before it was too late—yes, Nancy Drew was great and wonderful, but she made mistakes too. It was so gratifying to see my idol, though a fictional character, as human. Nancy Drew wasn’t perfect; she and I were more alike than I had ever dared to hope.

Nancy Drew meant so much to me growing up and into my adolescence. Even now I still draw inspiration from her. In every new version of Nancy Drew that the publishing world can come up with, they can never erase her generosity, brilliance, and resilience. They didn’t just keep the perfect parts either; they still kept her quirks and her mistakes as well. Though Nancy now drives a hybrid instead of her traditional blue roadster, she still forgets to gas up or charge her phone, or let her friends know when she’s going on a snooping mission and may need help. She will always be one of my favorite icons both as an icon of achievement and strength, and as an icon of grace under pressure and how to recover from mistakes and mess ups.