In my corner of the 1980s United States, Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks were a hotter commodity than G.I. Joe or Big League Chew. My family amassed its own little library of them to sate my hunger for choice, and we weren’t alone. In a 1983 letter to the creator of the iconic second-person children’s interactive book series, a teacher wrote: “In 20 years of teaching, I have never seen 12-year-olds so excited about anything as they are about Choose Your Own Adventure.” Now, as a grown-up who never has a fav she doesn’t want to see problematized, I was excited to see that Eli Cook, historian of capitalism and author of The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life, had written an article for the Journal of American Studies putting this series in its historical place.
We spoke recently, and Cook explained why he connects Choose Your Own Adventure to an ‘80s-era idea that now dominates our lives so thoroughly that it seems natural: the conviction that individuals can control their own destinies, if only they make “good choices.”
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rebecca Onion: Were you have a fan of these books when you were young? I certainly was.
Eli Cook: Yeah, of course. I love these books. I used to read them all the time. I remember going to the library, and having read them all, and wondering when the new ones would hit the shelf!
I’m mostly a 19th- and early-20th-century historian. I haven’t really written about the late 20th century before. But this is also the first time I’ve really written about history that’s so personal to me.
Do you remember what you liked about the Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were young?
I think it was the choices, right? It was the feeling of agency and power and freedom. Obviously we always used to cheat, and you would kind of flip to see if a choice would bring you to the end, and then pretend, “Oh, I didn’t see that!” [Laughs] They’re not the greatest books in the world, as far as plot; they’re often kind of superficial.
But I couldn’t believe that nobody had written about Choose Your Own Adventure as a bit of cultural history. They were so popular in some places that booksellers were complaining that the series and its imitators pushed all the other books out of the kids’ section. Two hundred fifty million copies sold! I think you could argue that this is one of the most powerful cultural artifacts of the 1980s.