Stuck on Youth

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Shortly after a foreign publishing house bought the rights to my teen novel, I traveled from my home in Brooklyn to visit with them. I walked into the publisher’s office to find a kind-looking woman with boxy shoulders and spider limbs. She had me sit down across her desk and offered me a cup of water. After some forced chit-chat about my flight and hotel, she squinted in that discomfiting way that people preparing to speak their minds do. I braced myself for an awkward editorial suggestion — maybe she wanted me to include more kissy scenes or tone down all the drinking that takes place before lunch period.

“The thing I don’t understand,” she said instead, her voice more hesitant and quiet than before: “Why don’t you just write novels for adults?” I wanted to remind her that the sum her company paid for my book would have purchased four pages of an average adult novel, but I was too busy feeling dejected to respond. I mumbled some unintelligible half-apology and took the elevator down to the lobby.

It keeps happening. When I tell people I write teen fiction, they tend to chuckle condescendingly, or perhaps even look a little embarrassed for me. Upon learning I had begun a second teen book, an editor at the newspaper where I work made the “cash money” symbol by rubbing his thumb against his index and middle fingers. When I ran into an ex-boyfriend he asked me what “the plan” was, meaning, expressly, when would I get around to writing the Great Grown-Up Novel?

Of course, I see their point. If I’m going to bother spending years of my life in pajamas writing novels, why not write the kind of novels that people — i.e. people I know — actually read? The suggestion that I should write adult books isn’t that far-fetched. It makes more sense than, say, urging an opera singer to try her hand at biochemical engineering. If teens grow up to become adults, shouldn’t teen writers grow up to become adult writers?

But truth to tell, I don’t plan on letting it happen to me. I like where I am just fine. In fact, now is an ideal time to be involved in the world of teen fiction. During the last couple of years, bookstores have doubled the real estate they devote to the species, sometimes moving entire bookshelves from the ghettos adjacent to the “life sciences” or “healing arts” sections and rolling teen lit towards the front of the shop. Wonderful new titles come out every week. They deal with more than just the crisis-counsellor issues that dominated teen lit a decade ago, offering readers books that are realistically worldly, as witty as their readers. Teen fiction is undergoing a remarkable transformation — the Wakefield twins of Sweet Valley High have had to step aside for new characters that are both believable and cool. The days of nice-enough, blonde-enough, B-plus-enough heroines are over. The new kids on the block have moxie and magical powers and, dare I say it, soul.

It’s not just the world of teen fiction that’s cast a spell on me; it’s also the people I’m writing for. Teenage-hood fascinates me — it makes me giddy and breaks my heart at once. Same goes for teenagers. Teens don’t get their due credit. They’re not unformed creatures, wobbling toward sentience; rather, they’re super-formed, super-sensitive, super-perceptive. They pay attention. They stay on their toes. They get it.

And teens are better readers than adults. They’re more flexible and imaginative. They don’t need to form book clubs; they know how to get lost in books on their own. As one gets older, reading becomes a very conscious act, an exercise in self-discipline: how many times have you made yourself finish the chapter before getting up to refill your glass of juice? When you’re young, reading isn’t work. You’re not doing it to tell people at some cocktail party that you just finished Freakonomics. When you’re young, you read for yourself, for your own enjoyment, for your own survival. You can spend an afternoon with a book and forget you’re thirsty until you’re 200 pages in. “Good writing” doesn’t mean something that seems to have been made by somebody who is smarter than you. Clever turns of phrase and evocative passages about death at sea are fine, but to young readers, it’s most important that the story have muscle, that it’s strong enough to make them laugh or whisk them up and drop them into some far-away universe.

As a young reader, I fell hard. Books gave me vivid worlds in which to play and hide, and my memories of my old school favorites, like The Catcher in the Rye and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, are still as bright and life-affirming as they were when I first came to their final pages. In college I went through a dark period, a time when I felt so alone I was sure I would break. My self-help book: an old copy of Harriet the Spy. Thanks in large part to Harriet, my life picked up, and I moved on to adult books.

Recently, I’ve come back to the world I left behind, gobbling up young adult titles between books by my favourite adult writers, like Barbara Pym and Raymond Chandler. The terrain of teen books is marvelously bumpy, each title an atlas of emotional highs and lows. Two of my recent teen favourites happen to be graphic novels: the heartbreaking The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner and Craig Thompson’s Blankets, a story about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family and first love.

I know I’m not the only old person who likes books for young people. A few weeks ago, I attended a reading featuring seven teen-lit authors and was amused to see that the majority of people in the audience were adults. Last month I gave a reading in Houston, Tex., and the event drew far more baby boomers than adolescents.

Really, though, it’s not that strange. Adult life is a slog: rent, deadlines, taxes, yoga classes and, on a fun night, paying $12 for a mediocre glass of wine. When I was in high school, my days were a merry-go-round of elation and anguish, being grounded and feeling free, falling in love and staring forlornly at the telephone, slamming my bedroom door in my parents’ faces over and over, night after night. What I would give to feel that same inspiration today. Banging a cabinet door would do!

I wouldn’t dare to say anybody in their right mind would want to be back in 10th grade, but who doesn’t ever wish life still felt as do-or-die as it did back then?

Lauren Mechling is the co-author of The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber, available on May 15 from Penguin Canada.

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