Summary: Thirteen Reasons Why

The GIST

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher begins after the worst has already happened. Hannah Baker, a high school sophomore, has died by suicide. Before she did, she recorded seven cassette tapes, thirteen sides in all, each one addressed to a person she holds partly responsible. The tapes travel from one name on the list to the next. When the novel opens they have reached Clay Jensen, a classmate who had a crush on Hannah and cannot imagine what he is doing in that company. He listens to all of them in a single night, and we listen with him.

Published in 2007, this was Asher's first novel for teenagers. He had spent nine years writing children's books that did not sell, and the manuscript was turned down twelve times before it was accepted on the thirteenth attempt. It went on to spend more than three years on the New York Times bestseller list, stayed in hardcover far longer than usual because readers kept passing it along, and was adapted into a Netflix series in 2017. It has also been one of the most challenged books in American schools and libraries, the third most challenged of the decade from 2010 to 2019. Asher has said that the story grew out of a close relative's suicide attempt, and that at bottom it is about how we treat one another.

The Story

A mysterious package arrives for Clay Jensen. He is pleased at first; everyone likes a surprise parcel. Inside are seven cassettes. He starts the first one and hears the voice of a girl who is dead.

Hannah explains the arrangement calmly. If you are listening, you are one of the reasons. There are rules. Listen to all of it, then send the box on to the person whose story follows yours. She hints that she has made sure the rules will be obeyed: copies of the tapes exist, and someone is watching. She has also given each listener a map of the town marked with the places where things happened, and she invites them to visit as she talks.

Clay does not want to hear any of it. He liked Hannah, more than liked her, and he is sure he never did anything to hurt her. But he cannot stop, because somewhere on these tapes is his own name, and he has to know what she says about him. So he heads out with the tapes and the map, and for the rest of the night he follows her voice across town, to a coffee shop, the school, a park, the houses of people he sits beside in class. The book runs on two tracks at once: Hannah's steady, sometimes bitter narration, and Clay's thoughts breaking in, grieving, arguing, wishing he could interrupt.

The story she tells starts small. Her first crush was Justin Foley, a boy a year ahead of her. They shared a kiss, her first. Afterward Justin let a different version get around, and by the time it finished circulating, she had a reputation she had done nothing to earn. That is the first tape, and Hannah's point about it is how little it took.

Everything after builds on it. Alex Standall made a list ranking the girls in the freshman class and awarded Hannah a title for her body. To him it was a joke; to Hannah it was confirmation, in writing, of what people already whispered, and permission for boys to treat her accordingly. Alex had just broken up with Jessica Davis, who had been Hannah's friend. Jessica believed the gossip, decided Hannah had come between her and Alex, and the friendship ended.

The tapes then turn darker. Tyler Down, a yearbook photographer, took to standing outside Hannah's bedroom window with his camera, so that even her own room stopped feeling safe. Courtney Crimsen, an acquaintance, helped Hannah catch him and then turned around and spread a fresh story about what was supposedly found in Hannah's bedroom. Marcus Cooley was matched with her through a Valentine's fundraiser, took her to a diner, tried to put his hands on her and called her a tease when she pushed him off. It is here, Hannah says, that the thought of ending her life first became serious.

Zach Dempsey sat down to comfort her after that scene and, when she did not respond the way he wanted, took a quiet revenge. In a class they shared, students left each other anonymous notes of encouragement. Zach began taking Hannah's, so that at the moment she most needed a kind word none reached her. Ryan Shaver, whom she met at a poetry class outside school and came to trust, stole one of her most private poems and printed it in the school paper. It ran without her name, and she was humiliated all the same.

Person by person, a pattern forms. Some of what was done to Hannah was cruel on purpose. Much of it was careless: a boast, a joke, a rumor passed along because it was interesting. Each thing closed one more door, on a friendship, on her sense of safety, on her belief that she was seen as a person. Clay, listening, keeps noticing the moments when anyone, himself included, might have asked her what was wrong.

Then the tapes reach the night of a party, and the tone changes again. What Hannah witnesses there, what she fails to do, what happens to her at a later party, and the conversation she finally has with the school counselor, Mr. Porter, make up the last cassettes. They are the hardest part of the book and they involve crimes much graver than gossip. And in the middle of them is the side with Clay's name on it. What Hannah says to him, and what he does when the last tape clicks off and morning comes, should be left for the reader.

What It's Really About

The novel's central idea is the ripple effect. Nobody on the list sets out to destroy Hannah. Most of them barely think about her at all. Asher's argument is that actions travel further than we see, and that a remark forgotten by the speaker within the hour may be carried by the hearer for months. A second idea follows from it: inaction counts too. Not stopping a rumor, not stepping in at a party, not asking the quiet girl one more question can do as much harm as an insult. The adults in the book are largely absent or out of their depth, which is its own indictment.

It is also a book about reputation and how it is manufactured, especially for girls. Hannah's supposed promiscuity is invented in a day and then treated by boys as a fact that entitles them to her. And it is about listening. The cassette device, which Asher hit on after taking an audio tour, puts a dead girl's voice directly in the reader's ear, intimate and impossible to answer, while Clay stands in for every reader who wishes he could.

The book has been argued over since it appeared, and a fair account has to include that. Critics, among them school psychologists and suicide prevention groups, object that it presents suicide as the outcome of other people's behavior and never mentions mental illness; Asher has said leaving that out was deliberate. Some worry that the tapes make suicide look like an effective way to be heard at last, or to punish. Reviewers have also pointed out that Hannah is not simply a victim. Her tapes can be as harsh as the people she accuses, some of those people are already tormented by regret before the box reaches them, and by her own account she failed others too. Readers disagree about whether that complexity is the book's strength or its problem.

Defenders, including many teachers, answer that silence is worse. One principal who kept it in her school put it this way: "If we don't talk about it, we're hiding from it." Asher has said that letters from teenagers tell him the book made them more careful with other people and more willing to ask plainly for help instead of dropping hints. The publisher's classroom guide treats it as a way to begin conversations about prevention, with the hope of raising the level of empathy on a campus.

Who Should Read It

Older teenagers, and the parents, teachers and counselors who want to talk with them about bullying, consent and despair, are the natural audience; the publisher suggests ages fourteen and up. It is a fast, gripping read with an unusual structure and no easy answers. It deals directly with suicide, sexual assault and harassment, so it is best read when you are in a steady frame of mind, and for a young reader, with an adult nearby who is ready to talk. Anyone struggling with thoughts like Hannah's deserves real help from real people, which is the one thing the book insists she should have had.