Thoughts on "Young Adult" Fiction

To this day, my favorite job ever was working as a data entry clerk. I spent 20 hours a week while I was in college and grad school typing in the metadata for books in the general interest section of the ASUC bookstore, which meant I spent 20 hours a week leafing through catalogs of books for both academics and a lay audience, including an extensive section of children's books. 

Some time between then and now—I'm sure the internet could tell me but I don't feel like looking it up—the publishing industry invented the category "young adult" or YA, for short. They are books meant for ages from tweens to actual young adults. The books are often genre bending stories that might otherwise be difficult to shelve in a brick-and-mortar store.  In the US at least, the fact that they are marketed to minors means you can talk about murder, torture, and all manner of horrifying dystopia—so long as nobody fucks. 

One of my enduring interests is the way that the culture views sex. People hit puberty an average of five years before they become legal adults in the US, and there is a peculiar, self-contradicting obsession with the sexuality of people who are biologically capable of sex and reproduction, but not yet legally or emotionally mature. In the interest of protecting them—quite necessarily!—from an evidently inexhaustible supply of Republica—uh, predators, the reaction is often to pretend like they are always and forever victims who do not have agency or libido. I often wonder whether the adults who cry about 17-year-old children* being exploited remember what it was to be 14 and horny. And if they don't, if they are in the position of never ever talking and listening to their own pubescent offspring. 

A response to the criticism that YA fiction contains no sex has been to say that children's books are not FOR adults, and so should not contain sex. The children and their books should be left to their chaste innocence.

Allow me to retort: Maggie told me she knew of a cadre of girls who had made a pact to lose their virginity—at the eighth grade semi-formal. Forget prom and the despicable movie 🐓Blockers. These girls were claiming to be set on—with absolutely NO practical probability of—having intercourse at 13. 

Please, tell me again about how "young adults" aren't interested in sex. 

FWIW, my child, who knows that her body belongs to her and her alone, and that sexual feelings are part of being human after a certain age that no one else can chose for you, wondered aloud if they were planning to do it in the backs of their parents' SUVs as they were being driven home, all being too young to drive themselves anywhere. 🙄

Naturally, none of this is to say that children do not need to be protected, but as with so much of life, everything is contextual. Fending off fundamental biological urges for five years is a lot to ask. Forty-five-year-olds scheming to get with perfectly legally-consenting 20-year-olds is kinda gross. A non damaging space somewhere in between would be ideal.

And all of this thinking on my part comes about because I am writing a book that would comfortably fit into the YA category—alternate history with a magical element—except that I will not back away from sexuality.

Eh. There are no more brick-and-mortar stores, so who cares where it would be shelved...

A Permanent Solution to Temporary Problems

This morning over coffee Antonio told me that Sarah's friend and schoolmate at Berklee tried to kill himself yesterday. Members of their group chat hadn't heard from him, so they walked over to his apartment only to find the police there. Danny Salazar had swallowed a bottle of pills and tried to hang himself. Over the course of the day, we found out that he would be ultimately successful. He was brain dead, and the doctors waited for his mother to arrive from Texas to take him off life support. 

It is indescribably devastating to imagine his mother's flight to Boston and her arrival at the hospital and at the bedside of a warm body that no longer contained her son, and to sit with it while the machines were turned off and ceased to keep its heart beating and its lungs filling, knowing that what was left was just flesh and that the child she had carried and loved beyond all rationality was irretrievably gone. My mind withdraws from imagining myself in her place, like a finger pulling back after accidentally brushing against a hot stove.

I never met Danny and I knew very little about him. He was a drummer. He had a crush on Sarah last semester, and when he met Antonio, he was full of bluster and casual, "playful" insults for Antonio, who could not even view him as a serious rival for Sarah's affection. Then he had an unreciprocated crush on another girl. Then another. He moved out of the dorms and into an apartment with friends. His band Archon Theory recorded a song—with irony worthy of Gen-X, it is called "Optimist"—and made it available to stream. They had scheduled a mini-tour of dates for performing live. 

I don't know what else was going on. Was he failing out of school? Was he unable to continue paying the tuition? Was he on medication that wasn't working? Or that he wasn't taking? Should he have been? 

I do know that every one of these amazing musical children—now young adults—is the product of years of effort and support from their families and teachers and coaches. The thousands upon thousands of dollars and hours that went into even the least talented of them, to end up at one of the most renowned music schools in the world, is staggering, and often worth every penny if it brings art and sometimes just joyful noise into the world with it.

And yet, Monday evening, it seemed to Danny that it was not enough to light whatever darkness he felt. He chose a permanent solution to what were only temporary problems. 

If he felt he wasn't a good enough musician, he could have practiced more—he was in school for music after all! If he was failing out of school, he could have worked harder. If working harder wasn't enough to pass his classes, he could have taken a leave of absence to improve enough to be ready for the curriculum. If he couldn't pay the exorbitant tuition, university education is not at all necessary, or even common, to being a rock musician. If a woman didn't like him back, there are 4 billion others. At 18—just barely beyond being a child!— and in reasonable health, the list of things that you are just impossibly too late to start and succeed at is quite short, limited mostly to "child prodigy" and many, but not all, elite sports. 

I have often said, with respect to suicide, that it is not my place to decide how much pain other people should be forced endure. But in this case, there were ways out that he did not take. Many different paths in life, medication, therapy. 

It is such an unnecessary tragedy.