Those Bad, Sad YA Novels: Get Off My Lawn Version

#yasaves

A few weeks ago, the New York Times brought us this anxious, hand-wringing take on all the bad, sad YA novels (possibly? sort of?) poisoning the minds of teens. Now we have the finger-wagging, crankypants take on the very same idea from the Wall Street Journal.

Well. I guess it's nice that liberals and conservatives can agree on something.

The two articles share three basic tenets:

1) that we parents didn't read such bad, sad novels back when we were teens (as we were too busy reading Ulysses and/or Anne of Green Gables)

2) that swearing and drugs and stomach-turning descriptions of abuse are "just part of the run of things" in modern teen novels and no one besides anxious and/or angry moms seems to care

3) that anyone under the age of 18 reads for no other reason but to learn valuable -- or in this case, destructive -- lessons.

All of these are wrong, of course. The first proves that the writers of these articles have completely forgotten all the lurid garbage they devoured as teens. Flowers in the Attic, anyone? Go Ask Alice?

The second is the result of the same stupid exercise we've seen again and again. A writer unfamiliar with contemporary teen lit gets ahold of this or that book and is shocked to find, well, whatever it is that shocks and alarms him/her most — sexuality or swearing or violence or bad writing or melodrama or "darkness." He/she then assumes these things can be found in all teen novels and proceeds to have a very public nervous breakdown.

But for every "dark" teen title that has NYT and WSJ columnists wringing their hands or shaking their fists, there are ten others that don't feature "kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings." Any YA librarian or well-trained bookstore clerk could name dozens upon dozens of sunny, thoughtful, well-written, challenging, and/or werewolf-free titles, a lot of them on the bestseller lists. So why aren't these the ones written up in the Wall Street Journal?

Setting aside the fact that realistic teen fiction — so-called "problem novels" — aren't half as popular as fantasy and sci-fi right now, these books seem to be lightning rods for parental anxiety. Which makes some sense. Teen novels illuminate teen culture, interests, and experiences, and these things can be particularly scary to adults trying to keep teens safe and healthy. Though the writer of the NYT article seems to be more of the "teen lit is about as artful as a sledgehammer" school of literary criticism, she doesn't deny that teen lit can sometimes accurately reflect what's going on in the lives of teens (even if she really doesn't want to hear about it, thank you very much).

On the other hand, the writer of the new WSJ article seems to belong to the "adolescence is a time of bunny rabbits and rainbows" school of thought. She writes that teen novels do not reflect teen culture as much as distort it, and that such distorted portrayals of teen life will create a hunger for ever more distorted portrayals. Ugliness begets ugliness, this columnist writes. Such books will ruin children's happiness, break their tender hearts, and normalize pathological behavior.

In other words, dark books will put dark thoughts in the kids' heads, ideas that they never would have come up with themselves. Dark books teach dark lessons.

Not be outdone by the NYT in the fearmongering department, this is when the WSJ columnist really starts brandishing her cane at the sky. She indicts booksellers and reviewers for failing to notice coarse language. She mocks writers for valuing free expression, and accuses librarians of "delighting" in banned book lists. She blames video-game-addled, aesthetically-challenged young whippersnappers at publishing houses for "bulldozing misery into the lives of children." She tells parents to stand strong against the tsunami of swill and the evil designs of writers, editors, and librarians.

And then she undercuts all this magnificent hysteria by declaring that teens don't read teen novels anyway.

So, why are we talking about this again? Oh, right. Comment-baiting!

Not surprisingly, the twitterverse and blogosphere have erupted, with many YA writers, readers, librarians and teachers talking about how teen lit can save lives (#yasaves). And I believe this is true. But I also think this bit from Roger Sutton's blog is interesting:

"Gurdon's argument about why gritty YA books are published is classic straw-man stuff:

The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

Who actually believes this is how reading works? It was Sheila Egoff who pointed out that the audience for Go Ask Alice was not drug-crazed runaways but nice little middle-class junior high girls with a taste for melodrama. People like reading about people like themselves whose problems are more interesting than their own. Unfortunately, the Twitterati are buying into Gurdon's thinking from the other way around, claiming that "YA saves," and that YA writers are brave and heroic and helpful, none of which qualities being particularly useful for a writer. Give me an author who is truthful and talented; spare me an author who writes to save lives."

What neither the NYT nor the WSJ columnist seems to understand is that teens read for all the same reasons that adults read. Sometimes a book will help a teen feel less alone in the world, or validate his/her personal experience (which, I'm sorry to say, can be all kinds of dark and abuse-filled). And in this case, individual books really can save lives.

But for other teens, books are a window onto lives and experiences entirely unlike their own. (As Roger Sutton says, they like to read about people with more interesting problems.) And we can't forget that a lot of teens, like adults, read simply because they want to lose themselves in a cracking good story filled with all sorts of drama.

Before we get ourselves all tied up in knots because teens occasionally read "dark" books, let's not forget that teens read all kinds of "dark" stories -- that is, violent, strange, bloody, and fabulous stories -- in their English classes. I'm talking about Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antigone, Beowulf, Lord of the Flies, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Canterbury Tales, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Lottery, etc. etc. etc. Why would we assume that Romeo and Juliet will be less triggering than, say, 13 Reasons Why? Why would we assume young adults are smart enough and sophisticated enough to handle Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but too dim, immature, and impressionable to be trusted with the latest vampire novel (or to put it down if they don't like it)?

And if our teens are too dim, immature and impressionable to set loose in the teen section of a library or a bookstore, don't we have a much bigger problem than books?

The Story That Ate My Brain

Great visit with some gifted/accelerated/fabulous kids -- including my niece -- at Holmes Middle School in Wheeling, IL yesterday. So many great questions about so many different things. My favorite, however, was the one I had the most difficulty answering. A girl asked, "How do you know if your work is any good?"

I said, "You have radio U-SUCK playing in your head, don't you?" The class laughed, and I went on to recommend Bird by Bird and told her that she had to focus on the feelings she was experiencing as she wrote. That if her writing was moving her, she had to trust that feeling. That she was the writer, but she was also her own first reader, and that if her work didn't move her, well it wasn't going to move anyone else.

And that's true, except when your despair and self-loathing drowns out every other feeling. Or when you've read your work so many times you have it memorized, and everything on the page sounds like the worst kind of cliche, and you're about as emotionally responsive as the half-dead ficus in the corner of the dentist's waiting room. The truth is, a lot of times you don't know if your work is any good. But you keep working anyway, in the hopes that you'll find your way to your story. And if helps any, kids of Holmes Middle, you're not alone . We all feel like we're right in the middle of the story that is eating our brains, and will, we are sure, be the death of us. Welcome to the wonderful world of writing. The thrills! The glamour! Who knew?

Right after I got home from my visit, my agent called with the good news that she liked my latest novel, and the somewhat deflating news that she wants me to revise the whole thing from the POV of a different character. Or maybe it was the POV of a chicken or cumulous cloud, I'm hazy on the details. I can do it. I can't do it. I change my mind every fourteen seconds or so. Maybe more coffee will help. Maybe the cats have advice. Maybe I can hire the children of Holmes Middle to write the book for me a la James Frey . I'll pay them entirely in Mountain Dew and Warheads. We will call ourselves Patheticus Gore and make a million little dollars. Or at least, I will. (Don't look at me like that. Kids love Warheads.)

But I wasn't lying when I told the kids that revision was my favorite part of writing. That I'd much rather wrestle with a malfunctioning manuscript than face a blank page. What I'm not sure I got across was the little period of mourning you endure when you hear that your story -- your baby -- is kind of cute but also a malformed and quite possibly psychotic, that it's got no arms, a couple of extra legs, fingers poking from the top of its wee furry head, and a single eyeball where its nose should be, and that the eyeball is staring RIGHT AT YOU, demanding you love it anyway. And when you stop feeling sorry for yourself, you find that you do love it anyway, and you get back to work.

Every Week is Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week has come and gone, but it’s not as if the book banners have packed up their outrage and gone home. While my friend Tanya Lee Stone is enjoying the launch of her newest book , she’s also dealing with a challenge to her YA novel: A BAD BOY CAN BE GOOD FOR A GIRL. Apparently, she told me, a few parents think that this spare and elegant verse novel is nothing but a “how-to,” and want it removed from a high school library.

“I’m assuming they didn’t mean that the novel is a ‘how-to’ on making good choices, surviving betrayal and being true to yourself,” I said.

Tanya said, “Uh, no.”

After I had gotten all my sighing and sputtering and snarling out of the way, we spoke about how horrible* it is to have your work called inappropriate and your intentions deemed suspect. But of all the frightening things that can affect teens—crime, poverty, hunger, bullying, drunk driving, suicide, drug abuse, date rape — I have to wonder why certain people are so determined to be terrified of books.

Not all books, though. While sexuality in teen books drives some people nuts, we don’t seem nearly as disturbed by violence. Where are the ardent challengers of THE HUNGER GAMES**, for example? Is it because we believe that any book honestly dealing with war must contain some violent content? Is it because all the adults are too busy devouring MOCKINGJAY to complain? Or is it because we can see more perverse brutality on a single episode of Criminal Minds? Why are we so much more freaked out by a naked guy than a guy with an ax?

Tanya’s situation reminded of that man who wrote to his local newspaper to call Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK “filth” and “pornography.” In his letter, he said, “This is a book about a very dysfunctional family. Schoolteachers are losers, adults are losers, and the cheerleading squad scores more than the football team. The cheer squad also gets their group rate abortions at prom time. As the main character is alone with a boy who is touching her female parts, she makes the statement that this is what high school is supposed to feel like.” Female parts? Really? If this man actually read the whole book, he didn’t understand a word of it. He couldn’t recognize the deep pain and suffering underneath the layers of irony, and took the narrator’s acid sarcasm literally. (Actually, the sarcasm seems to have gone entirely over his head, a problem more commonly experienced by eight-year-olds). He missed the entire point of the novel, which was the main character’s hard-won battle with depression in the aftermath of a crime. If teens have no trouble getting this book***, why was this grown man so scared and confused? Was he conflating his horror over the crimes depicted in the book with the book itself? Or is he just crazy?****

Book challenges are usually classified as battles between conservatives and liberals: “You conservatives just want to deny the reality of teens’ lives,” vs. “You liberals just want teens to read smut and learn how to be ho’s.” But I wonder if this is not so much a fight between conservatives and liberals as it is an argument over the purpose of reading. That is, people who view stories as a way to experience different perspectives and think through problems versus people who view stories, even fictional ones, as lists of “facts” or “instructions.”***** (Or worse, lots of boring, useless stuff punctuated by naughty bits that can be read aloud at school board meetings.)

Like all authors I’ve talked to, I believe that parents have a right to tell their own teens which books they can and can’t read. It’s only when one or two parents try to decide for everyone else’s kids that I get frustrated and sad. I have an in-law whose religious beliefs make a lot of books — including almost all of mine — off limits for her kids. When her son was young, she would request a different selection if she found an assigned novel objectionable. Some of the books she objected to were favorites of mine; A WRINKLE IN TIME was one, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was another. It was hard to hear that her son wouldn’t be allowed to read books that had meant a lot to me when I was his age. Then again, I had to admire the lack of drama with which she asked for another choice. There were no letters to the paper, no press conferences, no self-righteous speeches, just: “Can he read something else, please?”

I think this lack of drama showed her kids that though she believed they weren’t ready for some of these books, she wasn’t freaking out over the books, she wasn’t scared of them. So, neither were they. They were curious about the books, maybe, but not scared. I believe it was Chris Crutcher who said that people who go ballistic over books dealing with sex or homosexuality or suicide or violence ensure that if/when their own children have to deal with these issues, their parents will be the last people they’ll ask for help. Why would they, when their parents are clearly so very frightened already?

And raising teenagers is frightening sometimes. But I believe you can be frightened and still act bravely. That means that you don’t start screaming porn! porn! porn! simply because you don’t like what a book has to say. If pornography can be defined as sex without context or redeeming social value, than books like A BAD BOY CAN BE GOOD FOR A GIRL and SPEAK are anti-porn, that is, they are powerful and empowering stories that put issues of sexuality, betrayal, rape, and depression in meaningful context. They help teenagers think through these issues without having to experience them themselves, yet offer solace to teens who have. To turn these books into examples of porn, you must become a pornographer, you must strip away the context, strip out the characters, the plot, the poetry, the pain, the irony, the intelligence, the heartbeat, the story. You must slice up the pages, dice up the paragraphs and the sentences until all you have left are a few words or phrases -- Underwear! Backside! -- you can use to titillate your friends.

You can do this to every book. You can do this to any book. (Clifford the Big Red Dog? Well, what do you mean by “big”? What do you mean by “dog”?)

I lurk on a listserv for YA librarians.****** Something written by one of these librarians – forgive me, I forget his name — has stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like: “every day kids are living the kinds of lives we wouldn’t want them reading about.” We’ve watched the news, we’ve seen the reports of teens committing suicide after being brutalized or bullied or betrayed or outed, unable to envision a better future for themselves, or any future, for that matter. Do we really want take away stories of survival from teenagers struggling to survive?

Uh, no.



* It sucks. I don’t know any author who delights in a book challenge, or sells more books because of one. Unfortunately, I speak from experience; challenges are humiliating and depressing.

**Not hating on HUNGER GAMES, I like HG.

***Here’s a link to Laurie HA reading her poem called “Listen” that includes actual teen reader responses to SPEAK. Scroll down for the video.

**** Let's go with crazy .

***** Or maybe they assume that all people under the age of eighteen view books this way, which is just annoying. If teens read BAD BOY like a “how-to” then they read everything like a “how-to,” no? So why am I not seeing legions of girls perched in the oak trees around my neighborhood, picking off other kids with their homemade bows like Katniss Everdeen?

******No matter what some people would have you believe, librarians take into account the needs and wishes of their individual schools and communities when they purchase books for their collections. And every day librarians knock themselves out helping parents find books for their teens, no matter what kinds of requirements/restrictions those parents have. “I’m looking for adult novels for my 7th grader, but we don’t want sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction or novels with bad language or bad behavior or cats or kissing. Must be between 272 and 365 pages. Blue covers only.”

Bad Apple

I know, I know, I haven't posted much (uh, at all lately). I'm working on a new novel and a complete site redesign so things will be easier to find. That will be coming soon. In the meantime...

It's official! It's the pub date of my new novel, BAD APPLE! I'm uploading a picture of the cover here, because I love it so much:



Here's the description:

For Tola Riley, life is not a fairy tale, it only feels like one. She’s got evil classmates, a runaway dad, a wicked stepmother, a possible Prince Charming, and her very own troll. But it’s only when someone accuses her of having an affair with her art teacher, her whole world turns into something out of Grimm’s. Because the person accusing her is her own mother.

"If I really wanted to open up, I'd confess that I really am the liar everyone believes I am."

High-school junior Tola has green hair, a nose ring, an attitude problem, and a fondness for fairy tales, which are a great escape from real life. Everyone thinks she's crazy; everyone says so. Everyone except Mr. Mymer, her art teacher. He gets her paintings and lets her hang out in the art room during lonely lunch periods.

But then rumors start flying and Tola is suddenly the center of a scandal. The whole town is judging her—even her family. When Mr. Mymer is suspended for what everyone thinks is an affair, she has no choice but to break her silence. Fairy tales won't help her this time . . . so how can she tell the truth? And, more importantly, will anyone believe her?

“…by turns hilarious and touching, almost heart-poundingly suspenseful. The protagonist, who is unconventional, insightful and full of angst, charms, and readers will be hoping for her success.” — Kirkus Reviews

“…a different perspective on the whole student-teacher affair. The ending was absolutely fabulous, probably the best part of the book, and had me in fits of laughter. “ — Teensreadtoo.com