Parents' Guide to Who Put This Song On?

Parents need to know that Morgan Parker's Who Put This Song On? is the story of Morgan Parker, a 15-year-old Black girl, that's based on Parker's own journals she kept as a teen. The fictional Morgan is dealing with a recent diagnosis of depression and anxiety disorders, undergoing psychotherapy, and taking antidepressants. Morgan lives in a small Southern California town, where she's one of the few Black students at a conservative Christian private school. Her mental health issues and being a racial outsider complicate the typical difficulties of adolescent search for identity. Morgan has good friends, but her shaky self-esteem leads to behaviors like cutting school, shoplifting, setting herself up for some degrading sexual encounters, smoking cigarettes, drinking to excess, and smoking pot. A character takes Adderall. There's a suicide attempt. The descriptions of sex are frequent and graphic, including many passages about oral sex. A sexual encounter includes racial "dirty talk." The main characters are regular cigarette smokers, pot smokers, and underage drinkers. In one scene, very drunk and stoned kids bully a gay boy. Morgan drinks alcohol with the intention to get drunk, even though she's on prescription antidepressants and has been instructed not to drink at all. Some adults drink to excess. Profanities include "s--t," "f--k," "motherf----r," "p---y," "damn," "nigga," and "a--hole."