Y YA?

It seems that everyone is all ABUZZ regarding Margo Rabb's very thoughtful NYTBR piece on the indignities and ultimate pleasures of writing fiction for teenagers.  A lot of The Community seems mad about this article but, Margo, I hear you girl.  I started writing at least partially for the purpose of gaining respect and hopefully a little hot makeout action at parties and was surely in for a rude awakening when I actually started getting published and found that no one gave enough of a shit to even grab my ass.  The first question I get when I tell people that I write novels for teenage girls is "Oh, but you don't use your real name, do you?"

Yes, writing for young adults is something like being a porn star-- so shameful that a person is expected by the Serious New York Chattering Class to shroud his identity in secrecy.  (My porn name is Tommy Pinecrest, so if I ever decide to go the pseudonym route you'll know how to find me.)  It turns out the difference between being a YA novelist and a porn star is that people at parties are actually impressed by porn stars.  I can vouch for this; I have been at parties with a few porn stars and I was a quivering mess every time.  Did they even know I was in the room?  NO.

I have plenty of friends-- friends who shed big and sloppy tears at JUNO, for fuck's sake!-- who will never read any of my books for fear of losing precious IQ points.  People have basically told me this to my face.  For awhile I was offended, but I've decided that it's fine with me as long as these friends shell out the $$ for a couple of never-to-be-touched copies of the books or at least oblige me by filling a seat at a reading or two.  You can't worry about much else.  People at parties are never impressed by anything, and if they are, it only gives them cause to hate you and write bitchy things about you on the internet.  That's just how it goes around here.

I think a big part of the general suspicion about young adult books is that most people my age never read them when they were actually young adults.  What this means is that their notion of the category starts with Christopher Pike and ends, if you're lucky, with Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls. 

I myself read some really trashy YA books (not to mention WIFEY) when I was eight years old and then, having exhausted the limits of the school library, stopped reading entirely for awhile before I resurfaced at age fourteen and went straight to the grownup stuff.  It seems that a lot of people followed this trajectory, and it's for this reason that there seems to be a question of why YA is necessary at all.  If teenagers are capable of reading and enjoying books for adults, why should there be a special category of books for teenagers?  Are these books just intended for those teens too dull for Camus?

Maybe Camus is a bad example because, okay, it's hard to find a teen too dull for Camus.  The Stranger is pretty perfect for teenagers: it's really short and it's all about existential angst.  So forget Camus.  But haven't all the grownups in the room ever had the experience of revisiting a book you'd read (and thought you'd understood) as a young person only to realize that it made way more of an impact upon a rereading ten or more years later?  Like maybe you were always smart enough for it, it's just that you needed the experiences and concerns of an adult to actually make you care?  I think most people would answer yes.  And I think if that's the case that the reverse is also true.

I read WEETZIE BAT for the first time when I was fifteen.  I don't remember what caused me to read it; like I say, I didn't really read YA books when I was in high school.  But for whatever reason I read Weetzie Bat, and at the cost of sounding like a jerkoff, it completely changed my life.  I think the assigned reading in school at the time was Billy Budd or something along those lines.  Billy Budd is admittedly an extremely hot book, but at fifteen it was just not doing it for me or any other person I knew.  Weetzie Bat, on the other hand, left me walking around in a daze for a week after I read it.  I was exhilarated by the lushness of the world Francesca Lia Block had created and at the same time kind of depressed because that world didn't actually exist.  It was the same feeling some of my friends got from certain types of music.  Block was my Moz.

These days I reread Weetzie Bat every few years, and I will always love it.  There are lines I can quote by heart and it still gets me in the gut to see them on the page-- both because they are great passages and because they bring back such visceral feelings of what it was like to be the person I was when I first read them.  The book is weird and gorgeous and revolutionary on its own terms, but I think it's probably somewhat difficult for a person over a certain age to wrap his head around the brilliance of it, especially if he's reading it for the first time.  Yeah, you can certainly love it as an adult.  I definitely love it as an adult, but when I reread it, I feel like parts of it are maybe going over my head. 

Reading Proust at fourteen would I guess not be totally pointless, but it might be better to save your efforts until you've at least eaten one of those little cookies.  In the same way, reading Weetzie Bat at thirty is definitely worth your while, but I feel sorry for you if you didn't read it when you were fourteen, because I bet you would have understood it better.  And that's the point of having books specifically for teenagers.  There are things you learn as you grow up, but there's also a understanding that you lose.  In writing what I write, I'm usually trying to relearn some of that lost knowledge.

As for the snobs in the mess hall at Yaddo: if I really wanted to impress people I would have become a BLOGGER.