Waiting for the Right Monster to Come Along: On Twilight, Abusive Relationships, and YA Saves

I had barely finished formulating my beliefs about the YA Saves controversy when I found them being challenged. But the attack didn’t come from the friends with whom I discussed the controversy, the worried parents of teens, or even from the supporters of Meghan Cox Gurdon’s article. No, the challenge to my beliefs greeted me coyly from the top of my to-be-read pile. Because the first book I picked up after the YA Saves controversy began was Twilight.

To say I dragged my feet when it came to exploring the Twilight trend would be a gross understatement, and it probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I’m not one of the world’s biggest fans of the books. Still, I give them a lot of credit; the series made countless people, young and old, into readers. The books turned a lot of already avid adult readers on to the young adult genre, essentially doubling the potential audience for many of the books I work on. They made a profit for their writer and their publishing house, and by spurring an interest in teen paranormal romance they’ve helped a lot of other writers and publishers turn a profit, too, in an industry too often plagued by low or nonexistent profit margins. As a member of this industry, I can’t help but be glad when, whatever the inspiration, people are getting genuinely excited about books. We need that fervor, regardless of what stirs it up. And, despite myself, I found many parts of the first book (mostly the parts devoid of descriptions of marbled abs, beautiful faces, or snowing-because-it's-too-cold-for-rain [wth?] weather) really enjoyable.

But when I think about the vast throngs of teenagers who have read the series and swooned over Edward, it physically pains me. Because no matter how many times Edward saves Bella’s life over the course of the series, that will never change the fact that, on their first date, he tells Bella he may not be able to stop himself from killing her. It doesn’t change the fact that he follows her, threatens her, makes all of her decisions for her, cuts her off from her friends and family emotionally and physically, instills her with the belief that his murderous impulses are her fault (she “has to be good” and not lose control of her urges when they kiss, so as not to tempt him), and attacks her when she says she’s not afraid of him, just to make sure that she learns to be. That’s just in book one, and it sure doesn’t sound like any healthy relationship I know of. In fact, I’m not the first person to point out that Edward’s and Bella’s relationship shows all the signs of an abusive relationship.

And while I may have some doubts about Ms. Gurdon’s claim that dark young adult literature normalizes self-destructive behavior, I do feel that Twilight normalizes—no, glorifies—unhealthy relationships. A glance at the popular website My Life is Twilight, where fans of the series share examples of how their life mirrors their obsession, makes my stomach turn. Here are just a few reasons why:

• “Today my boyfriend explained to me that he wouldn't want to live in a world with out me, and that's why he's so over protective.”
• “Today, I woke up to see my boyfriend watching me sleep. I thought it was so cute and not at all creepy.”
• “I want to be loved the way Edward loves Bella. Does that even exist anymore?”
• “My boyfriend cut the brakes on my car! MLIT!”

Am I the only one who gets shivers just reading that? Or, for that matter, whose skin crawled reading some of Edward’s dialogue in the novels?

And I’m far more upset about this glorification of unhealthy love than I am about the darkness Ms. Gurdon spoke of in YA lit. Typically, young adult novels that tackle dark issues like rape, cutting, abuse, and drug use at least communicate the very real and incredibly heartbreaking dangers of those issues. Most offer a glimmer of light and healing in their endings, conveying not only that healing is possible, but also that healing is necessary after encountering these issues—indeed, by implication, that they are unhealthy. In stark contrast, Twilight presents a frighteningly abusive relationship as an ideal.

Out of low self-esteem, a lack of inexperience in love, or manipulation on the parts of their partners, many victims of emotional abuse confuse their partners' abusive behavior for exactly what the books make Edward's actions out to be: signs of intense devotion and passion. That the Twilight series seems to encourage that confusion breaks my heart.

Given the rather frightening statistic regarding teens in abusive relationships and the fact that at least one in three women will experience violence in a relationship during her lifetime—and especially because I've seen the devastating effects of emotional and physical abuse firsthand—I’m extremely uncomfortable with Twilight's idealization of abusive behavior. So if you asked me if I’d like to stop teenage girls from reading Twilight, I’d really, really want to say yes.

But I can’t be both against censoring dark content in young adult literature and for banning a particular series because it exhibits a trend I find scary. I can’t both believe that teenagers are smart enough to make positive decisions and accuse these books of brainwashing teens. I can’t believe that young adults need to be free to own their own destinies and then try to prevent them from learning for themselves what healthy love is. And I can’t deny that, in relationships like in everything else, those who are drawn to darkness are going to find it regardless of how others intervene, and only they can decide to look for a way out.

So while I won’t be recommending Twilight to any of the teens I know, I can’t and won’t argue that the series should be banned. Instead, I hope that those who are as concerned about the dangers of abuse as I am will use the books’ popularity as a jumping-off point for conversations about what healthy relationships look like. I hope many librarians will learn from YALSA’s L. Lee Butler, who uses the book as a tool for anti-domestic and sexual assault education. I hope that parents, friends, and teachers will talk to girls about their own experiences (both good and bad) in relationships so that these girls can begin to decide for themselves what healthy love looks like. I hope that writers will come together to depict more balanced relationships in just as alluring a manor, and that teenage girls will begin to migrate toward stronger female characters and model their relationships off of healthier examples.

It’s reassuring that the first five comments teens made on the My Life is Twilight post that worries me most all urge the person who submitted it to question the healthiness of her relationship and to seek help. Though it’s easy to get caught up in the dream world of fiction, I do have faith in readers to sort out (sometimes through the mistakes they will invariably make) the difference between fiction and reality. And I trust that teenage girls will be smart enough to listen, strong enough to survive whatever path they turn down, and powerful enough to heal themselves and to heal others when it's needed.

I have to have faith in that.

On YA Saves and the "Normalization" of Self-Destructive Behavior

On the weekend that Meghan Cox Gurdon published her now-infamous Wall Street Journal article decrying the darkness in Young Adult literature, I took a break from the #YASaves conversations on Twitter to have some fascinating discussions offline, with friends and roommates and publishing industry connections and anyone who would muse with me for a minute. I talked with friends about the article’s implicit assumption that YA as a genre belongs to privileged, protected young adults who can reasonably expect shelter from the horrors in many novels, not the many teens who are underprivileged and devalued by the very color of their skin or the neighborhoods in which they grow up (Sherman Alexie handled this brilliantly in his response to Gurdon's article, “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood”). I talked about the tendency of adults to forget that children are actually capable of handling a great deal of sorrow—that they even seek it out as a natural part of growing up and forming an identity (something I wrote about back in 2009). I talked about how that article related to the book I was reading at the time, and I want to talk about that even more next week.

Mostly, I discussed my feelings about one section of Ms. Gurdon’s article in particular:

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.

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue.

Ms. Gurdon's second article in defense of the original, published last week, went on:

For years, federal researchers could not understand why drug- and tobacco-prevention programs seemed to be associated with greater drug and tobacco use. It turned out that children, while grasping the idea that drugs were bad, also absorbed the meta-message that adults expected teens to take drugs. Well-intentioned messages, in other words, can have the unintended consequence of opening the door to expectations and behaviors that might otherwise remain closed.

Oh, how I turned that idea over in my mind! I want to disagree with the sentiment, but I can’t—not with my whole heart.

As a high schooler, I watched one friend of mine after another come to school with gashes on her arms. It happened over the course of a year; by the end of it, nearly half of my regular group was self-harming. I listened to discussions of where scars could most easily be hidden, how to acquire razors or scissors or sharp enough knives, and most of all what it felt like, why it was impossible to resist. My friends and I were dark teenagers, and our taste for dark books and films was insatiable. When I try to remember where we first encountered the concept of cutting, I don’t know which came first: the book I recall all of us reading, or the first person one of us knew who self-harmed.

Would we have encountered cutting outside of literature? Probably. Would it have seemed alluring, written in the scars on an acquaintance’s arms rather than the delicate prose of a book we treasured? I don’t know.

But do I think that the book “normalized” cutting, as Ms. Gurdon suggests? No. What I believe is that my friends, who were hurting immensely for all sorts of reasons, encountered what they thought might be a solution to their pain in those books.

Of course it was no kind of solution worth having. It was horrific. It made everything darker. At the time, if I could have saved my friends from going through that pain or stopped them from hurting themselves, I would have. But I couldn’t. So I waited. I hoped that things would get better, that they would find their way out of the darkness and into someplace lighter.

And you know what? They all did. They’ve become mathematicians and computer scientists and accountants and research assistants and neuroscientists and writers. They’re married or in relationships or single. Some of them make a lot of money, and some don’t. Some of them live with their families, some of them live with friends, and some live on their own. Some of them make art, and some make tools, and most of them somehow make the world a better place for a living. Last time I checked in with them, they were all happy. Isn't that what we all want for teens?

But we had to explore that darkness. If we hadn’t, we would have sat always in the sun, wondering, wondering what temptations the shadows might be hiding from our sight.

My mother called me a few weeks ago to talk about one of my teenage relatives. She was worried, she told me, by his behavior, the people he’s hanging out with, the hobbies he’s taken up. He’s dreadfully close to making a decision, she says, that could destroy his future.

“Let him,” I surprised myself by saying. “He’s smart. He’s going to realize, eventually, what a mistake it was.” I paused. “I mean, I did, didn’t I? And I’m okay.”

I believe that few mistakes are completely irreparable. And I believe that teens are going to make them, no matter what wisdom we impart, what measures we take to shelter them from darkness, and what rules we enforce about what they can and cannot see, think, and do. And I have faith in teenagers. I have immense faith in their intelligence, their capacity for survival, and their ability to heal. That’s what’s missing in these arguments about the darkness of YA lit: the faith in teenagers to navigate those treacherous waters—the faith that teens can and will find their way around to the right path, even if it means backtracking because they’ve gone the wrong way.

What are we so afraid of? That teens will make mistakes? Didn’t we?

And doesn’t every person deserve a chance to own his or her destiny?

They say that the only way out is through, and I believe it. When my friends and I think back on those dark times—and when I think back on the many stupid, painful, destructive decisions I made as a teenager and all the ways in which those decisions could have affected my future—I don’t want to go back and erase any of it. All that darkness became a part of the people we were growing into. It made us strong, it made us powerful, and it made us empathetic. It taught us where we didn’t want our lives to go, and in doing so it taught us what we did want, and who we were. And when our morbid curiosity lost its charm, and the horrific ways we found to patch up our wounds failed us, we started looking for a way out of the darkness. And we all found one, no matter how far in we'd gone or how many mistakes we'd made.

Because darkness lasts only until you seek out a place that’s light.

Edit: Maureen Johnson and Meghan Cox Gurdon herself continued this debate today on WHYY. If you missed the show, catch up here. I was glad to note that one of the callers brought up what I do in this article: that what's missing from the discussion is adults' faith in teenagers' intelligence and ability to make decisions.

WHY WRITE?: Young Adult Fiction

Thanks to everyone who voted on genres for the Why Write?^TM series last week! Voting is still open, so if you haven’t chimed in yet, head on over now to put in your two cents.

As for how the voting played out last week: literary fiction took the lead, followed by a tie between Young Adult fiction, sci-fi and fantasy (or speculative fiction), and historical fiction (who knew I had such history buffs among my readers?!). Romance followed that with just a few votes, and westerns and mysteries received a single vote each. I’m excited to dive in on those top four, and if you guys really like the Why Write?^TM series, let me know and I’ll tackle the extra challenge of dissecting romances as well.

I’m going to jump in at the middle here because today’s post flows pretty naturally from my recent post on why character transformation works so well in YA fiction. So—why write YA?

Because you want a welcoming audience. Teenagers who read do so voraciously. They read in school and out of it. They flock to blogs and message boards, they review the books they read on Amazon and in their own blogs, and they spend hours discussing their favorite books with their friends. From the droves of teens who dress up as characters from The Hunger Games or the Harry Potter series for Halloween, to those who flock to communities of writers and readers like John and Hank Green’s massive posse of Nerdfighters, to those who, hungry for more of their favorite characters, take to reading and writing fan fiction, I don’t know of any audience that more actively interacts with their books. Writers of YA, by and large, love to interact with their audiences—and how could they not, in the face of such devoted readers?

Because your readers need you. Middle school and high school can be nasty, and teens both yearn for connection and desperately fear putting themselves out there. I think that’s a big part of why so many teens become ardent readers. Like everyone, they want to open a book and see someone they recognize come to life on the pages. But even more than the adults who read, they need that character who’s just like them—to know they’re not alone, to know they’re not as strange as they feel, to know that if it’s bad, it can still get better. Affirmation and hope can be hard to find in the bitter wilderness of childhood, but a great YA author can give that to a teen.

Because you want to write something deep… Teens are smart and hungry to critique the world around them, including the books they read. Teens often get a bum rap for being addicted to video games, TV and Facebook, but the majority of teens I know are more tuned into the world than a lot of adults. Unlike so many tired nine-to-fivers, they can spend all day thinking at school and still not be ready to shut their brains off and veg when they get home. They’re not daunted by complex plot structures or layers of meaning, and they’re intelligent enough to understand and expand upon complex themes. If you have something serious to say, you might actually be more likely to be heard by a teenager than by an adult.

…But you also want to have fun with it. At the same time, teens are brutally honest and quick to call bullshit. They love to be blown away by a book’s deeper meaning, but they’re not as likely to put up with unnecessary frills. Books for teens are often more fun to read than adult books, without sacrificing the complex themes you find in literary fiction. Compare The Hunger Games or Feed to A Brave New World or 1984 and you’ve got similar themes being expressed in a more fast-paced, fun format. No one ever said that, just because you have something to say, you can’t have fun saying it.

Because you want to change the world. Teens are passionate, political and idealistic. Just as they’re eager to think critically about the world around them, they’re hungry for a cause to believe in—and, as Robyn pointed out a few weeks ago, they're quick to act on their ideals. If you’ve got a message, you might be better off imparting it on the young than on the old. Adults can be jaded or may have already decided exactly where they stand on an issue, but teenagers are still learning all they can, deciding what they think, and committing themselves to ideals. What’s more, teens are just a few years away from inheriting power. Given the right ideals, the next generation might be able to live better than we ever have.

Because you want to change a person. The books we read as teens are often the ones we remember best and love most fiercely, and for good reason. They determine the people we become, the ideals we adhere to, and the way we view the world. There’s a reason that the fight for people of color on book covers and for diversity of gender, sexuality and race in literature has been fought so much more loudly in the kid-lit community than in the world of adult fiction—we recognize that readers of YA are still forming their worldviews, and that books play a powerful role in that growth. The worlds teens experience when they read will help them, whether they are conscious of it or not, to decide what’s right or wrong and what’s normal or abnormal in the world around them. In some ways, picking up a pen to write for teens is (as one of the programmers in my office would say) your Spiderman moment: with great power comes great responsibility. When you write a book that hits home for a teenager, you help to form the belief system he or she will take into adulthood. You can literally have a hand in making that teen the person he or she is becoming.

Do you agree? Disagree? Maybe there are other genres that do some of these things better. Maybe I missed a few good reasons. Let me know in comments!