In response to Wall Street Journal article, a love letter to YA lit

Posted by meghaston on Jun 6, 2011 in Blog | 10 comments

ShareIf you’re plugged into the young adult literature world, or if you’ve been within ten feet of a Twitter account in recent days, this will look familiar:

#YAsaves

It’s the Twitter hashtag that was created in response to this June 4th Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Cox Gurdon, proclaiming contemporary young adult literature to be far too dark, grotesque, and and violent for any young adult’s own good. Gurdon argues that YA lit’s exploration of difficult topics/themes like death, drug use, self-mutilation, and anorexia essentially has the potential to give teens who might not otherwise have thought about using drugs or starving themselves the idea to, you know, give it a shot. So any good teacher/librarian/parent should beware: if your kids didn’t have problems before, they will after reading today’s young adult literature. Gurdon says: ”It may be that the book industry’s ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still… the book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and… no family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.”

I’m seriously biting my tongue here. But my reaction to the piece (Okay! I think it’s ludicrous, just for the record!) isn’t the issue. More significant is the way in which writers, agents, editors, publishers, librarians, parents, and most importantly, READERS, rose up to defend their beloved genre. Hence the hashtag #YAsaves. By Sunday morning, #YAsaves, and the millions of Tweets proclaiming ways in which YA lit had enhanced the lives of its readership, were trending at #2 on Twitter in the U.S. Media outlets were asking writers for their rebuttals to the piece. And I’m pretty sure Meghan Cox Gurdon was hunkering down in a bunker somewhere far, far away.

I’m not going to use this post to attack Ms. Gurdon. There are plenty of posts doing that already. There are also posts defending her piece, including this one. Instead, I’m going to use the post to thank young adult literature for everything it has done for me. I want to share my own personal experience with how #YAsaves. And I’d love to hear yours.

** Note: When I use the term “Young Adult literature”, below, I’m also talking about middle grade literature, for readers 9-12. Additionally, I’m speaking of all the books that I read as a young adult. Some would fit into the genre, and some wouldn’t. But it’s my blog. Sooo, there.

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Dear Young Adult literature,

Thank you.

You have been such a significant part of my development as a child, a teenager, and now, an adult. I won’t be able to speak to all your many contributions to my life here. But that won’t keep me from mentioning just a few.

Thank you for LITTLE WOMEN, by Louisa May Alcott. I was given my nickname after the eldest daughter in the book, Meg, and I’ve always felt a special connection with that work. It, along with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s THE SECRET GARDEN, was one of the first novels to show me the absolute power of the written word to paint, to transport, to create a world entirely different from the world in which I existed. These books stimulated my mind and my imagination, and introduced me to headstrong, smart female characters. So thank you.

Thank you for Beverly Cleary, and for every RAMONA book she ever wrote. Those books kept me company every night as a child, in every new city I ever lived in, and through every sick day I ever faked. And when I read somewhere that Cleary had started writing after she found a stack of computer paper in the linen closet of the house she’d just moved into, I had this crazy, inspired thought. I thought: She was just an ordinary person. Maybe I could do that one day, too. Write books. Maybe even for a living. Thank you.

Thank you for Judy Blume, and ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET. I read that book long before I had any sort of conversations with my mother about puberty, so in essence, it served as my education, my introduction. And it normalized how completely awkward, messy, and just plain strange this part of any young person’s life is. It wasn’t just me. Thank you.

Thank for you for broaching the painful, difficult, ugly parts of life that ALL teenagers (and indeed, all human beings) experience but that not all teenagers are able to process, question, or share. Thank you for Jan Marino’s EIGHTY-EIGHT STEPS TO SEPTEMBER, which introduced me to the concept of grief, and taught me that everyone grieves differently. Taught me that there is no one right way to grieve. I have brought this lesson with me and slipped it from my pocket when I’ve needed to remember: as I’ve dealt with death myself, as I’ve watched others grieve, as I’ve worked in therapy with clients who are experiencing loss. Thank you for Laurie Halse Anderson, for SPEAK and WINTERGIRLS. Thank you for this writer’s courage to confront issues like rape and anorexia, because they are there– they impact ALL of us in one way or another– and ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. Books like these have made it (more) okay for teenagers to open up, to dialogue with friends and parents and therapists about the issues they’re confronting. Books like these have normalized my own struggles, and made it okay for me to put them on paper. Thank you.

Thank you for J.D. Salinger’s CATCHER IN THE RYE, for capturing and exploring some of the fundamental themes of adolescence.

Perhaps most of all, YA lit, thank you for my careers. Thank you for so inspiring me that I felt the push, the drive, to do this thing we call writing, and to do it every day. Thank you for piquing my interest in the unique, uplifting, and tragic nature of every human being’s life story– which in no small part led to my decision to go to graduate school and to study psychology. I don’t know how the rest of my life story will unfold, but I know that in some way it will involve you, young adult literature.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

With love,

mh

*Note: The YA Saves button is courtesy of @NovelNovice.