I was going to get on the bandwagon and tweet about this, but alas, my response will take WAY more than 160 characters. So I’ve decided to get up on my soapbox AGAIN!! I know, that is twice in one month. I’m becoming very opinionated 😉 (Those that know me would laugh at that, btw.)
If you were attending some graduation festivities yesterday, like moi, then perhaps you missed this and the well-attended twitter kerfuffle that has resulted. Infuriated young readers! YES! Frustrated authors! Even more YES! Parents who just want their kids to read something clean and decent!! *looks around* What, no takers? Yes, you in the back? Just scratching your head? I thought so…
The major issue I have with this article is EVERYTHING. It is so biased that I can’t even believe that the WSJ allowed it to be published without an opposing point of view! What was going through my mind as I was reading it was much the same as a prominent and well respected YA author tweeted. Does this critic actually KNOW any teenagers? Does she know what they see every single day? Does she know what they worry about? What they are afraid of? What they talk about in the bathroom at school? What keeps them up at night? What shapes their experience? What secrets they are keeping from mom and dad and everyone because they are afraid of what it will mean to tell?
She mentioned that 40 years ago there was no such thing as young adult literature. Hello, FORTY YEARS AGO–red flag for relevance anyone?–today’s teens weren’t even a twinkle in their mama’s eyes! MY generation wasn’t even born 40 years ago. And therefore, whether or not that statement is TRUE is of little consequence. The world has changed in 40 years, so what was relevant to a teenager 40 years ago isn’t the same as what is relevant to a teenager today. We have televisions in every home–huge televisions. Music has evolved and diversified. There are video games that delight and video games that disgust and video games that make you go WTF is the point of this? Thanks to Wii and xBox, we can dance and karaoke with our huge televisions. We can stream Netflix through the video game console into the huge television. And if you want your television to yourself because you love it so much, your kids can have internet and games right in their bedrooms–in their POCKETS. Young people have daily, nonstop access to raw, uncensored, mature material and they are trying to make sense of it! And while, yes, parents do need to become tech savvy if they want to protect their kids, to say this entirely a parenting issue is foolish–because teens have friends (hopefully)! Parents can only control what comes in their home, not in the homes of their kids’ friends. Parents can still talk to other parents, but there is a whole lot more material to wade through than 40 years ago. Does Johnny have wifi in his bedroom? Yes? Do you have NetNanny and do you use it? No? Then I’m sorry, Billy can not stay over. Parents can only communicate with their kids. They can attempt to control who their kids hang out with, they can give them a telephone with a GPS chip in it to see if they are going elsewhere when they are at Susie’s house, but ultimately, the minute your teenager is out of the house, they are making their own choices. Parents can only guide and communicate and love and hope their kids will come to them to process the stuff they experience that is uncomfortable.
Which brings me to books. I’m positive that 40 years ago, when YA hadn’t really been invented yet, that teens were reading. Maybe not as voraciously, but I don’t really believe that. What I know for sure is that 20 years ago, kids were reading, and they were reading LOTS of “inappropriate” things. I know because I was one of those kids. I was a voracious reader. I read the ENTIRE YP section of my small town library by the end of 7th grade. During the summer, I used to ride my bike to the library unaccompanied (which was a considerable distance) and peruse the bookshelves for a title that might be new, or that I might have missed somehow. I was desperate to get to high school because I knew there was a shiny new-to-me library there and that it HAD to have books I hadn’t read yet. In 8th grade, I begged my mother to sign the permission form so that I could read from the adult section. She both cringed and laughed as I devoured Stephen King and V.C. Andrews alongside Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Dickens. Those adult books gave me a whole lot of WTF moments. They made me uncomfortable. They made me aware of the darkness in the world. They helped me understand why someone would succumb to the darkness. They helped me see that I could know the darkness and still look for and live in the light. They challenged my child thinking and made me start to think like an adult. Which is EXACTLY what a teenager should be doing.
It is a blessing, not a curse, that there are more books for and about teens today. This means that teenagers get more choice in what they read. This means that they are not forced from that comfy “clean” nest of the children’s section straight into the “dirty” objectionable grown up world (where they will spend the rest of their lives). There is a larger place in between where the main characters are LIKE THEM, experiencing the same things they are experiencing–and in many cases–allowing them to experience the things their friends are going through. How many friendships could be saved if people understood each other MORE? Today’s YA promotes that culture of understanding. I wonder what my experience would have been growing up if there had been a book like Patricia McCormick’s Cut. I might not have needed so much therapy to realize that there are alternatives to cutting. I might have had more hope SOONER if I had realized so many other girls–girls I hadn’t ever met!– were secretly making themselves bleed to release that pressure valve inside themselves created by societal pressure to stuff their true feelings, be “nice” to everyone (which isn’t the same as not being mean), and perfectionism. (As if perfect is normal. Ha!) I might have felt less ashamed for ten years of my life if I were able to TALK to my FRIENDS about what I was doing–if ones who didn’t cut could tell me without judgement–with understanding and compassion–how THEY coped with fear and failure and loneliness.
When I stand in the YA section of a bookstore, I do not observe a sea of dark ugly covers or “hideously distorted portrayals of what life is”. I stand in rapt amazement. My heart swells with hope. I see a landscape that is rich in imagination with young narrators. I see shelves and shelves reflecting the truth back at me–that life IS ugly sometimes, but that looking away is much more dangerous than walking through it hand in hand. I see a future of plentiful reading material for my own kids–opportunities for them to walk in someone else’s shoes and develop compassion and wisdom. I see windows into their souls when they head for the YA section. What will they choose when they walk up to the bookshelf? If they pick up the Hunger Games with all it’s beautiful violence, what will they learn about the war between darkness and light inside the characters? What questions will they have when they are done? If they pick up Speak, will they be able to understand later when a friend is raped? (Because if you have seen statistics, you know that it is a certainty that one of your child’s classmates will have this happen to them before they graduate.) If they choose Crank, will they remember it when someone offers them drugs? After reading 13 Reasons Why, will they think of this character when they are faced with the choice of speaking up when someone is being bullied?
I am who I am today because of the books I read when I was young. The ones I remember most weren’t all shiny and happy–they were the ones that hurt me to read…the ones that made me identify with and love the main character. When I loved that main character, I learned to love myself. Thank you, Judy Blume. Thank you, Anonymous Author of Go Ask Alice. Thank you, Cynthia Voigt. Thank you, Stephen King. Thank you, Jane Austen. Harper Lee. S.E. Hinton. John Knowles. William Golding. THANK YOU.
