Better to Light a Candle than to Curse the Darkness (Cecil Castellucci)

Here we go again. Every once in a while someone writes an article insinuating that YA Authors are purposefully writing dark books with inappropriate subject matter for teens. On June 4^th, 2011 it was the Wall Street Journal that published an article by Meghan Cox Gurdon about the Darkness of YA books.

We’ve been down this road before. Every time a book is banned in a library or from a school. Some of those books are good and some of them are bad. But here’s the thing: a good book is never bad for you.

Gurdon’s article starts off with a 46-year old mother wandering around a book store. She can’t seem to find a single book for her teenager that isn’t rife with “dark, dark stuff” like “vampires and suicide and self-mutilation” and walks out empty handed. Really? Ms. Freeman couldn’t find a single book? I bet she could have.

I hang out at my local indie bookstore Skylight Books a lot. Every Christmas I wrap presents for them for charity (I wrap for the Jenesse Center). The wrapping station this year was by the YA section so I ended up bookselling, too, because people mostly just stood around the YA section not knowing what to get. So I’d politely ask if they needed help. And they’d say, “Yes.” My first question was always, “What kind of kid are they?” Some adults would get that question. They’d say “Oh, they like this” or “They read way above their age” or “Their parents are crazy hippies so they’ve been exposed to everything” or “These are their favorite books.” Other adults would say, “Well they like this, but I want to get something that is good for them.” I can tell you which kid was happy with the book they got for the holidays and which kid unwrapped their present and never wanted to read the book they got (or maybe any other book ever again). A shame really, because putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers. Because one book leads to the next book and the next book and the next book and that is how a world-view grows. That is how you nourish thought.

Yes. Let’s admit it. There are dark books in the YA section. But there are also just as many that cater to different tastes. There are many kinds of YA books, just as there are many kinds of authors and many kinds of readers.

Look, YA authors get it. We get that some kids are not ready for this or for that. We get that not every kid is alike. We get that.

But YA authors are not deliberately trying to write something that is horrible, or shocking, or going to get banned. YA authors are writing books the same way any other author does, word by word, in order to tell a story that wants to be told. Sometimes we even feel like the story needs to be told. Maybe it’s personal. Cheryl Rainfield of Scars is telling a personal story. And those scars on the cover of her book are her scars. That's her arm pictured on the cover.

YA authors understand that parents are trying to protect their kids. YA authors love that you are all good parents. That you care. That you get in there. You know what, taste is a funny thing. What might be to your taste might not be to mine. But you can’t CHOOSE what my taste is. (I like caviar. I hate pineapple on pizza.) And teenagers have their own tastes.

Gurdon’s article in the WSJ seems to imply that these kinds of dark books should be cleared off the shelf and that good clean books with less objectionable content should be there instead. And that the publishing industry, in the name of sales, pushes these kinds of books to pervier and pervier extremes and then cries censorship if called on it.

This week I’m going to be lecturing at UC Riverside’s Low Res MFA program talking about writing for young adults. One of the questions that I get asked all the time is “What can’t you write about in YA?” And I say, “You can write about anything.” “Anything?’ “Anything.” People look at me incredulously and then just to say something I say, “OK, maybe you can’t write about shitting on someone’s face.” But actually, you could totally write about shitting on someone’s face. The point is you can tell whatever story you want to tell.

I wonder how many times adult writers get these kinds of questions. Oh wait, I think they don’t. They just do like we YA writers do, they write books. I don’t think that they ever think about what they can or cannot write.

A few weeks ago, Sarah Ockler and Bennett Madison had great blog responses to a review in the New York Times which started with this sentence: The purpose of young adult literature is often twofold: to tell a story, and to send a message, usually in the form of a much-needed lesson. There is this underlying idea that YA literature has to be good for you. That it has to be sanitized in some way. That it has to have some kind of message or adhere to some kind of moral code. The thing is that one person’s idea of OK is often different than another’s.

Teenagers (and children) live in the same world that we adults do. And no matter how much we try to protect them they see the same current events, they live through the same havoc wreaked by floods, tsunamis, murders, rapes, beatings, hurricanes, abuse, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents, climate change, and more.

And if they don’t, they might have family members who do or have. Or they read about it in the paper or see it on the news or the internet and they seek to understand the incomprehensible. They struggle just like adults do to understand and make sense of the world and of what it means to be human.

I’ll freely admit that Andrew Smith’s The Marbury Lens (which Gurdon talks about in her article) scared me and I could only skim it. I told Andrew, who is an acquaintance, to his face that I couldn’t get through his book. I also told my friend Kevin Greutert, who directed Saw VI, that I could never see his movie. Guess what, those kinds of stories are the kinds of stories that some people love. They are just not for me.

One of the things that is remarkable about kids is that they will read what they are ready for and what they don’t get, they skip over.

I read Judy Blume’s Deenie when I was 11. Deenie was always touching her special spot that made her feel good. I had no idea what or where that spot was. But I thought having a special spot was a good idea. So I picked one on my body. It was right above my right hip bone, like where my appendix is. Sometimes I’d touch my special spot. Now I know that Deenie’s special spot and my special spot were totally different spots.

I think that we underestimate teenagers and young people in general. Because it’s not that they become desensitized to violence or anything bad when they read these things in books. It’s that they are growing their world. And oftentimes they only understand what they are ready for. And no one, not me, not you, not anyone, can ever dictate what someone is or isn’t ready for. Or what they might need to find their way. Sometimes darkness leads to light. That is what is so great about all young adult fiction.

And for the record, not all contemporary YA fiction is dark. The WSJ article would lead you to believe that all of it deals with dark subjects. But it doesn’t. But it is fantastic news for all of us that some of it is. I like to look at some of the hard things that are being written about as opportunities for conversation. What one child is ready for is not necessarily what another child is ready for. Teenagers, like adults, come in all different shapes and forms. They also have different tastes. I don’t argue with that.

But that doesn’t mean that you deny a book that some kid might need. Some kid might need Shine. Or Scars. Or Marbury Lens. Or Hunger Games. Or Rage. Or any other book that might seem at the outset to be too dark. Why not talk to them? Why not figure out why they are attracted to whatever it is they are reading?

For Ms. Gurdon to say that the YA publishing industry “pulls up its petticoats and shrieks 'censorship!'” is ridiculous. If you are saying that books should be cleared off shelves because they are not to your tastes, then we cry censorship because it is censorship. Children and YA books are banned because adults try to decide what is appropriate or not for a child. But the thing is, you don’t know what is appropriate for every child. You don’t know what book a kid’s life might well depend on.

Because YA books with hard topics and uncomfortable subject matter do save lives.

Authors like Andrew Smith, Lauren Myracle, Cheryl Rainfield, and all the others who go to the edge and into the dark are spelunkers of the human condition and I salute them.

I don’t want to silence them and neither should you.

So, here is my proposal. Buy a book. Pick one — perhaps one from that WSJ article, or from the following list, or maybe a book that saved your life. Buy it and donate it to your local library, or to your school, or buy it for a kid in your life so that all kinds of stories are available for young adults and adults alike. Let’s make more books available.

Stay tuned for YA authors weighing in on this issue on the LARB blog all week.

The Los Angeles Review of Books highly recommends all the books name checked in the WSJ article:

The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler

Scars by Cheryl Rainfield

Shine by Lauren Myracle

The Absolute True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

A random selection of great contemporary YA novels from my bookshelf that are about maybe some hard things but which, as YA Editor at LARB, I can highly recommend:

Identical by Ellen Hopkins

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert

Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr

Wild Things by Clay Carmichael

Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin

Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles

Under the Moon, Under the Dog by Adam Rapp

Claiming Georgia Tate by gigi amateau

Boy Toy by Barry Lyga

Empress of the World by Sara Ryan

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Stained by Jennifer Richards Jacobson

The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin

Tyrell by Coe Booth

Some “dark” books I read as a young adult between 11-18 and I turned out no worse for wear:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Outsiders by SE Hinton

Christiane F

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Candide by Voltaire

Deenie by Judy Blume

The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough

Letter to An Unborn Child by Oriana Fallaci

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

The Stand by Stephen King

Wifey by Judy Blume

Ruby Fruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

The World According to Garp by John Irving

All the Dune books (even those weird last ones) by Frank Herbert

Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins

Scruples by Judith Krantz

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Trial by Kafka

I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

Cecil Castellucci is the Young Adult Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She writes contemporary YA fiction which is darker than some and less dark than others: Boy Proof (obsession with apocalypse); Queen of Cool (some hand jobs); Beige (drugs & recovering junkie parents); The Plain Janes (terrorism); Rose Sees Red (friendship abuse/anti-war); and the upcoming First Day on Earth (trauma and alcoholism).