In which I rant about reality and fiction
If you somehow missed it, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled Darkness to Visible by Meghan Cox Gurdon on June 4, 2011. Gurdon’s article can be summed up in her statement: “If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.”
If Gurdon believes that the worlds in young adult fiction are completely wrong, then what world does she live in? Does she live in a world where men who drive vans and offer candy to children are merely trying to be everyday Santas? Does she live in a world that doesn’t need police because everyone is always happy and gets along perfectly? I am honestly curious because I would like to visit that world one day. It sounds like a better place than the reality I see day in and day out.
The reality I live in is where a friend of mine was beaten by her stepfather repeatedly and only escaped when she moved away for college; another friend’s stepsister was molested by her mother’s boyfriends when she was a child; my neighbor and childhood friend, who went to Catholic school, is now a drug addict because she wanted to rebel against her parents; I know a girl who lost her virginity at the young age of 14 because her mother wouldn’t explain what sex was and she found a guy who showed her. These are not fictional stories where authors are trying to shove their “pathologies” down my throat. These stories are reality. Banning books that deal with these books won’t make them go away!
According to Gurdon, “Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail.”
40 years ago, my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic and it wasn’t until about 5 years ago that my mother realized it was okay to talk about that experience with other people. Maybe if she had read books that dealt with these issues it wouldn’t have been so hard for her to open up.
As any good therapist will tell you, it’s never good for a person to bottle up emotions; and when a person feels like they’re the only one in the world who is having a certain emotion then they aren’t going to really want to open up to the world. Which is exactly why we need to keep these so called dark themes in books and keep them available to teens.
You could ask any teacher and they would all tell you that it is very near impossible to make a child/teen/person read a book that they don’t want to read, usually because the students can’t connect with the characters in the novels. If teens realized that there were books out there that dealt with what they were going through in life, I believe that more teens would start to willingly read.
That’s not to say that these themes started popping up only recently. Vampires have been around for hundreds of years, thanks to Bram Stoker and again with Anne Rice back in the 1970s. Emily and Charlotte Bronte both wrote highly angsty novels in the early 1800s. Edgar Allen Poe, who is a highly acclaimed author and his works are taught throughout schools worldwide, wrote incredibly dark, macabre stories/poems. His works are far, far worse than say Jackie Morse Kessler’s Rage (which Gurdon used as an example). I read (and reviewed) Rage, and never once while I read it did I want to cut myself. Instead, I cried and felt empathy for Missy, knowing what it was like to feel so isolated.
The YA community exploded with outrage after the release of Gurdon’s article. Within 20 minutes the hashtag #YAsaves was the third most popular trending topic on Twitter for the United States. There are thousands of tweets, each explaining how young adult books saved/changed their lives and you can reads them here. My personal favorite came from Editor Hulk. He tweeted:
HULK READ #YASAVES TAG. HULK CRY BIG GREEN TEAR. HULK LOVE BOOKS, GLAD TEENS READ. THINK @WSJ SHOULD READ MORE BEFORE WRITE ARTICLES.
New York Times Bestselling author Libba Bray (and one of my favorite authors ever) even tweeted an extensive response to the WSJ article (which they kindly posted here).
And when one feels alone–say, because of a terrible burden of a secret, something that creates pain and isolation, books can heal, connect. That’s what good books do.
The books people connect best with are the ones that deal with the issues we deal with every day and that’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time. Yet, at the same time, not every single YA book is filled with “vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff,” as Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, claimed at the beginning of Gurdon’s article. Ever heard of Meg Cabot, Ally Carter or even Julie Kagawa? All of them are award-winning YA authors with “happy” books. (And I say “happy” because I’m not getting into the “clean” vs “dirty” books debate not because their novels deal with only happy themes.)
I could go on and on about reality vs. fiction, dark themes in fiction vs. “clean” books, the first amendment vs. banned books, etc. but ultimately, it’s all merely my own opinion. You could think I’m completely right, or that I’m completely wrong, but in the end it is my opinion. In the end, the only person’s opinion who should matter is the reader. The reader gets to pick what books she or he wants to read and no one should be able to take away that right.
The thing is… if YA read NOTHING but YA that is not good. As a teacher it is my job to get kids to read those “unreadable” books. The goal is to show them that there ARE connections in EVERY SINGLE BOOK. It doesn’t need to be YA or darkity dark. The young adult person just needs to be open to new ideas. Half the time they get disinterested is because the packaging of a book isn’t pretty or the font is too small. Or, to be honest, the teacher is boring.
You could even take it to the idea that children NEED to learn to focus on stories that they don’t like simply because that focus is needed in life. Just like the stories reflect real life’s hardships sometimes reading needs to be work.
I’m not sure if I agree with you or disagree. I don’t think all YA is too darkity dark for children. But I DO think that more parents need to be involved in what their kids read and discuss it with them. No matter how uncomfortable it seems.
I’m not saying that teens should only read YA books. I agree with you that teens should have to read a variety of books. My point here was that not all YA books are dark, evil, and need to be banned.
Parents do need to be more involved in what their children read. But they also need to be more involved in the rest of their lives too. These themes that parents are finding too hard to discuss ARE found in reality. Banning the books doesn’t get rid of the problem.