Funhouse Mirrors (Margaret Stohl)

WSJ Newsflash: Some Old People Don’t Like What

Some Young People Are Reading!

It sounds like an Onion headline. But it’s true; on Saturday afternoon, the WSJ (Media Translation: Old People) published a sweeping, genre-wide condemnation of the YA genre, inked by Meghan Cox Gurdon. By Saturday evening, YA’s unofficial Ambassador @libbabray (among others) took to the Twittersphere (Media Translation: Young People) to respond. Vice-Ambassador @maureenjohnson was right there with her, creating the hashtag #YASaves to encourage YA readers to share positive experiences with the genre as a counterpoint. That evening, #YASaves became the third-highest trending topic in the country, and interestingly, the world. The responses number in the thousands and are still coming; you can still read them today and I suggest you do. Some speak of reading as they question sexual or personal identity, or struggling to find a place in their families, relationships and the larger world. Others talk about turning to books to survive rape, divorce, incest, eating disorders, loneliness and depression. Some just love to read.

#YASaves is the real rebuttal to Ms. Gurdon’s editorial, and truthfully, though you should also check out what @libbabray, @hollyblack, @maureenjohnson @LizB, and @PersnicketySnark have all written on the subject, there is nothing more powerful than the voice of the readers themselves. On Saturday, YA readers felt personally affronted, as did YA writer/readers; as one of the latter, I can tell you we aren’t so different. We write the books we write because we need to, even these many years later -- as Holly Black tweeted on Saturday, “Honestly, @wsj, do you think we just make this stuff up? The darkest parts of many of my books came directly from my teenage life. #yasaves”

The WSJ sort of attack is, as @cecilseaskull pointed out on this blog yesterday, nothing new – but, then again, this was the Wall Street Journal! (Growing up in my house, where my father was both an Investment Banker and a Mormon Bishop, there was the WSJ and the Bible, and the distinction was negligible.) And it wasn’t just that; within the article itself, the YA genre was characterized with soapbox-your-ears words I haven’t seen since researching the James Joyce obscenity trials as a grad student at Stanford.

Let me do the word cloud for you: Depravity! Lurid! Explicit Abuse! Violence! Pederasty! (“What’s Pederasty,” my now interested teen asks, reading over my shoulder) Pathology! (“So it’s a disease?”) Brutal! Hideously Distorted! Funhouse Mirrors! (“Wait, are we still talking about books?”) Damage! Horrendous! Smut! Objectionable! Grotesque! In other words, as Kurtz would say, the Horror, the Horror!

There is much to take away from conversations like these, particularly, though it didn’t start out as a conversation, the speed with which it became one. While the WSJ article took the form of a depersonalized, one-way transmission of contempt – a writer who doesn’t seem to care for YA reporting second-hand that a mom who hadn’t read YA couldn’t find the right books while a BN worker who hadn’t read them either couldn’t help – it was rebutted in an open-ended, inclusive fashion by thousands of details offered from individuals to whom the genre spoke personally, specifically, and successfully. And while comments attached to the original WSJ article remained largely from people who didn’t care to read the depraved stuff either (you had to register with the WSJ to comment) it was left to Twitter to explode with the other half of the conversation.

Explode it did.

The article itself doesn’t merit a point-by-point rebuttal; in tone, it was reminiscent of a younger student before coming to office hours. I could almost hear myself saying “Depravity? Really? Can you support that? Do you think you need to temper that language just a bit?” But, if you insist on talking about depravity, let’s talk about the depravity of a world where, as more than one twitter voice said, so many people are hurt in so many ways so much of the time -- but instead of talking about how to keep these things from happening, we’ll talk about how to not talk about them. Let’s talk about the depravity of firing librarians and cutting teacher salaries and eliminating all the many knowledgeable voices who could have helped that mother discover what powerful stories were available to her child.

But you want to know what’s really depraved? According to my teen, “when old people like your stuff. That’s seriously creepy.”

So thanks, WSJ. Like rock n’ roll, pants, and my right to work and vote and drive, you’re paving the way for my daughter’s generation to still think reading is SMUT, I mean, cool.

Hate on, if you don’t mind. I’ve got two more daughters to go, and I’d really like to keep them reading?

Why?

Because #YASaves.

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

Margaret Stohl has a MA in English from Stanford, and is the co-author of the Beautiful Creatures Novels (with Kami Garcia). She lives with her smutty! husband and three joyously depraved! daughters in Santa Monica, in a house with two highly objectionable! beagles yet sadly no funhouse mirrors! at all.