Coming of Age Speech

Coming of age is something that everyone will go through at some stage in their life, whether it’s when they’re toddlers, children or teenagers. It is individual to everyone. The main age group of this topic is usually in teenagers, and focuses on issues, insecurities and doubts that they may have about life. A way for them coming of age is finding out how they deal with these doubts or troubles. Through the novel “Touch Me” by James Moloney and the film “Ten Things I Hate about You”, directed by Gil Junger, we can identify examples of coming of age through the characters in both stories. The key issues discussed will be peer group pressure and the search for identity.

In the novel “Touch Me” by James Moloney, one of the main characters names is Xavier McLoughlin who definitely is a great example of a teenager with issues in his life. Xavier, also known as Xave, is a teenage boy in year 12 who is a typical footballer. He meets a girl called Nuala. They both go to different schools but happen to see each other at the train station on their ways home from school every day. Xavier and Nuala eventually, in time, start going out. Nuala isn’t like every other girl though, she is different. She dresses in her dad’s clothing – baggy and manly. In pages 102-103, we see emotive language from Xavier when he says “piss off!”, as he’s expressing the way he feels and showing his so called friends that he’s annoyed because his friends are calling her a “Dyke”, which is colloquial language. This shows his friends paying him out and that they are not supportive of Xavier.

The reason Xavier likes Nuala is because she is different. He is finally experiencing different things in his life and has found someone he loves. For the first time in his life, Xave felt like he didn’t belong, because he realized really how cruel others can be, to perfectly normal people. Xavier does what is right and chooses Nuala over his friends, as he realizes that he was peer pressured into not going...