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 YA? Are Teens Just Better at Saving the World?

In response to my post about character transformations, Julie commented that, more often than not, the characters she sees featured in epic fantasy novels are teens. She also asked several good questions:

Obviously writing about teenagers has a lot of merit as far as all the physical/emotional/maturity changes people face at that stage in life, but can character transformations be just as effective when the character is older? And is it the same for someone in their 20s-30s as it might be for someone who is 40-50 or 60-70? Is there something else that makes adolescence such a special (and popular) time to showcase in a novel of epic proportions? Is this a recent trend?

It's possible that this seems like a recent trend because (1) Young Adult (or YA) fiction is a relatively new thing in and of itself, with publishers having only started to market specifically to teenagers in the last 40 or so years, and the genre has been growing ever since, leading us to (2), the fact that the Young Adult market is booming right now, while a lot of other markets for fiction remain somewhat stagnant due to the recession, changes in the industry and other miscellaneous Doom and Gloom. But I don't think the trend Julie noticed is a fluke—there are some very real advantages to featuring teenage characters in your novel, and/or to marketing it to teens.

I do think that character transformations can and often are handled extremely well in novels intended for and about adults. The Kite Runner is a great example. Though a good portion of the novel is narrated in retrospect and some of its most important moments feature Amir and Hassan as children, Amir’s transformation does not occur in childhood. In fact, he very deliberately avoids it until well into his adulthood. Having lived with and loathed his cowardice and selfishness for years, it is the adult Amir who finally transforms into a man willing to accept the personal cost of standing up for others. Despite that, I think that the emotional journey of that novel is every bit as effective as that of a well-written YA novel.

But I do think that YA as a genre has its inherent benefits when it comes to staging an important character transformation or an epic journey. I often see novels for adults, like Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill, taking advantage of those benefits by allowing a childhood story of transformation to be narrated by an older character who looks back on his or her youth. In both books, the narratives allow their readers to feel the immediacy of the characters’ growth the adulthood, but the ever-present knowledge that the tales are being related by characters who have had the opportunity to reflect on these experiences keeps them solidly in the realm of adult fiction.

So what are YA’s inherent advantages when it comes to building change?

Julie nailed one of the major ones, which is that, quite simply, teenagers are already changing drastically. On top of changing physically and emotionally with puberty, teens find themselves outside of the supervision of adults for the first time ever and begin discovering their own power to act independently. This is one of the defining characteristics of YA literature in comparison with books for younger readers. Often Middle Grade novels focus on conflicts which are confined, like the characters themselves, to a family unit—or, in the case of Middle Grade novels in which the characters do go on an epic quest, like Gregor the Overlander or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the adventure cannot begin until the adults are out of the picture. Teens, however, are typically given more freedom and are quick to begin pushing boundaries.

Secondly, it’s a fascinating time to write about, because when faced with a problem teens don’t have the benefit of experience to draw upon. As a character in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas says, “Bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.” Teens experience failure after failure and, for the first time in their lives, they aren’t protected from it. And whereas adults often have the experience to recognize plans that are doomed to fail, and enough cynicism not to pin all their hopes to their next plan of attack, teens are passionate, often impulsive, and extraordinarily resilient—so with each new approach to an obstacle, they throw themselves into the fight, certain that this new approach will change everything. All those idealistic forward motions and devastating failures are incredible devices for building tension, and teenagers’ transformations are usually all the more intense for the fervor with which they approach every challenge.

With all that boundary-pushing and newfound independence, teens are also discovering the consequences—both good and bad—of their actions. They keenly feel the importance of everything they do, from how they dress to where they sit in the cafeteria. Plunged into a social hierarchy which is quick to remind them of any trespasses, most teens become hyper-aware of their every action as a choice made within and critiqued by that hierarchy. And every action and emotion within that environment is heightened, dramatic. Maybe the teenage years seem like such an ideal setting for an epic adventure because they are a time at which every challenge we face really does seem epic, every love feels like true love, and every obstacle seems like it could be the last.

And I think the realization of a social hierarchy, coupled with that newfound independence, does something else powerful—it awakens in teens a constant awareness of a world that is larger than them. Up until their teenage years, almost all of their choices and actions are filtered through the adults around them before reaching the outside world. With their newfound freedoms, teens are just discovering that their choices can create change in the world around them, and they take to that like wildfire. Every teen seems to be an activist.

So teens aren’t just changing themselves—they’re changing the worlds around themselves, they’re actively looking for change (and they fervently believe in it), and they’re molded by each of their endeavors. These are juicy, defining years, ripe for transformation. How we deal with the conflicts, challenges and heartbreaks we face as teens determines the adults we become—and who doesn’t want to take part in recreating that experience?

Questions? Have your own theories as to why this trend exists? Let me know in the comments!