For the past few months I have been working on revising my novel Sliver of Light, at the request of an editor, to be more suitable for a young adult audience. She gave me some excellent tips for how to do this, and I did a little supplemental research by taking a look at some of the popular young adult novels published right now.
What I discovered is very bleak: suicide, eating disorders, fatal diseases, family tragedy, social cruelty. It gave me hope and a little reassurance, not only because Sliver of Light deals with a couple of these subjects but because it told me my own adolescence was not nearly as anomalous as it felt at the time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Katie Rophie gives an overview of these dark books that are on young adult section shelves right now.
It brings to mind my senior year of high school, when I was a little more circumspect about sadness (I had discovered The Smiths toward the end of my junior year — it helped), and was also an editor of the school literary journal. Needless to say, a lot of the work published was what people call “dark.” My art teacher, Mr. Cory (who was also the teacher adviser for the school’s Christian club) asked me, with a little of both bafflement and disapproval, why teenagers had such turns of mind, why they were drawn to the depressing. I answered something along the lines of “Because life is hard.”
I think it’s important to remember not to view such a statement by a seventeen-year-old who seems to have no real problems as outsized dramatics. When you’re a teenager it’s true: Life is hard. You’re beginning to see how profoundly you can be disappointed or disappoint others yourself; you can be taken aback by cruelty, both that of others and, shockingly, that of yourself; you feel the pressure of the future as you’re pressed about colleges, about majors, about extracurriculars; you begin to keep secrets about your thoughts, about what you do; and sex! my god, sex is so confusing. It’s all so new, too, so of course it feels overwhelming.
What appeals to you, then, is something that seems to hold a mirror up to your experience. Rophie expresses this well in her article:
It might appear to adults casually perusing “Wintergirls” and “Thirteen Reasons Why” that the kids and experiences within their covers are fairly uncommon and overwrought. But it seems that the extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives. Your whole family may not have died in a car wreck, but it sometimes feels like they have. Everyone in the school cafeteria may not be plotting to kill you with bows and arrows, or knives, or mutant killer insects, but it feels like they are. In the theater of adolescence, with all the sturm and drang of separating from parents, with the total stress of just having to be yourself in the hallway at school, perhaps these books feel, at times, like a true and reasonable representation of daily life. It may be that the feverish drama of a 15-year-old’s private universe finds its natural form in these tales of destruction and death.
One thing that Rophe doesn’t explore is of interest to me: Why are most of these books targeted toward teenage girls? The shelves are full of books with descendants of Esther Greenwood
But in all, I’m glad that young adult fiction is now embracing rather than expressing bafflement at the teenage mind, not disparaging it, not implying that it should be something different. I remember what I thought when I answered my teacher but did not say: Why are you asking me this as if teenagers are another species that you have no experience with? Haven’t you been a teacher for years? Weren’t you ever a teenager? Don’t you remember what it was like?
A child could have been born and grown into a teenager in the time since I graduated high school, but I like to think that I remember what it was like. I no longer have my journals from that time. I destroyed them — that’s how hard it was. But I remember a drawing I had made of myself, faceless, in the inside cover of one of them. I felt hated and unrecognized — do I want to forget that feeling? No, because it was part of my life. Right now, I feel like the best way to redeem that girl I was is to show other girls like her that they’re not alone.
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