In which I have a headache and soapbox about YA.

Ah, Friday.

I can't actually decide if I'm excited about it being the weekend or not. Partly this is because I've been temporally out of joint most of the week -- it's felt like Tuesday all day today, felt like Friday both yesterday and Wednesday, and my whole sense of what time of day it is has been shot -- which I mostly attribute to my sleep being terribly disordered this week. There was one night I couldn't get to sleep until well after 1 AM, and at least three others that had me waking up at 2 or 3 AM.

If nothing else, I suppose the weekend is an opportunity to sleep in as much as I like. Considering that I'm walking tonight with a local Relay for Life team, then assisting with set-up and doors at the annual Pride shindig on Saturday, this is a Very Good Thing.

And, of course, I'm finishing up this month's Hold Something, which has had me stymied at every turn, in part because every time I've settled in to work on it these past ten days, I've had no end of distraction. I've been joking that subscribers are going to get an obscene doodle and an angry haiku or limerick this month. I suppose I'll know on Monday if that's true...

~*~

I haven't got a proper surgery fundraising total at the moment since I have to separate out the HS subscriptions from donations in PayPal, and that much arithmetic is beyond me at the moment -- terrible headache, had to take a taxi home, have to be out the door in about fifteen minutes, all of which is apparently Time to Freaking Blog Already -- but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I've added three classic Doctor Who novelizations to my current eBay auctions, and that there's more fannish stuff to come, as well as some watercolor instruction books that my mom has donated to the cause.

As always, much gratitude to everyone who's chipped in thus far. Y'all are amazing.

~*~

I'm seeing a lot of people being appalled -- rightly, I think -- by a piece in the WSJ by Meghan Cox Gurdon about YA fiction and how it's all far too terribly dark and awful these days compared to the sweet fictions of yesteryear.

I should confess, first of all, that I was never a particularly big reader of YA when I was the right age for it. Yes, I dabbled -- an aunt had access to cheap books from Scholastic for a while, and I soon found myself awash in various titles, including a hysterically mis-matched set of Narnia books -- but I was a precocious reader. I went into Kindergarten having already learned to read by sitting up in bed with my grandmother, picking out words from her massive collection of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and was generally disinterested in books about teenagers fumbling around trying to date when there were other things about.

Which, honestly, is unfair to YA as a genre. On the other hand, between that and the fact that it's all growing up narratives, I was happier reading adult fiction and non-fiction than messing around with the whole thing.

What I do remember, though, are the narratives I found compelling when I was getting into my teens. I went in for a lot of darkness, a lot of heightened emotion, a lot of offbeat humor. I devoured Douglas Adams and Anne Rice, Donna Tartt and Stephen King. I liked the idea the Judy Blume was writing stuff that upset people, but reading her just didn't excite me.

The music, too, that spoke to me wasn't the stuff being marketed to my age group. At its loudest, my soundtrack was Ministry, the Sex Pistols, Nine Inch Nails, and Slayer. At its more thoughtful, it was R.E.M., Oingo Boingo, and Killing Joke.

Some of these books and some of this music has stuck with me, some of it hasn't, but I remember so clearly that what I wanted at the time was something that allowed me to engage what felt like a series of difficult, disconnected images. I wanted stuff that hurt and raged the way I was hurting and raging. I wanted catharsis, a place where things could safely go wrong in terrible ways, where the things that happened were miles beyond what should actually be happening.

It was a sort of anti-fantasy, an avenue of rebellion, and a sort of totemic representation of my emotional state that I could identify with without necessarily needing to cultivate a massive drug addiction or murder a friend in the woods. And, looking back, while I suppose any adult who was really able to correlate everything I was reading and listening to and fantasizing about could easily have been concerned, I can't help but feel I'd have actually done myself more real harm without that safety valve.

Gurdon is upset by aspects of the current wave of YA fiction -- language, the not-nice things about characters' lives (drugs, alcohol, violence), the way some frightening elements of the modern social landscape are commonplace -- and seems to have nothing but contempt for the writers who decry those who'd set themselves up as gatekeepers for these books' intended audience. She casts aspersions on the ALA's Banned Books Week, as if all banned and challenged books are full of what Gurdon calls, simply, "depravity."

Which is, I can't help but feel, ridiculous. As an adult who's come to read more YA fiction than I ever did as a youth, what I see in these books is a reflection of familiar things -- albeit in some cases heightened -- from my own youth. Toxic relationships, the difficulties of being trapped in a school where one is bullied or ignored or pressured, the kids who smoke, fuck, and do drugs, and so on.

If we are honest with ourselves as adults, and rip off the rose-colored glasses (something I somehow missed out being issued, thank goodness), we may well remember the dangerous, foolish, intense, strange things we did as teenagers with a certain sort of anxious horror. Which, I think for parents, manifests in unique and hilarious ways. "No son/daughter of mine is going to spend the night drinking and smoking weed in a trailer on the edge of town..."

Right. Let's all swear ourselves in and give testimony, then, to what precisely we were doing in our generations' weed-and-booze trailer equivalents, shall we? Because while I was more or less well-behaved, I can name a handful of occasions between the ages of 12 and 18 in which I might have done some things my mother would not have approved of. Her stories, meanwhile, put mine to shame.

In the end, I think I cannot help but counsel those who, with Gurdon, go a little pale when they think that our precious future is being exposed to things that upset them that they are not the audience. Most adults either no longer have the same acute drive to push the envelope, to seek thrills, or to transgress as a teenager does.

At fourteen, I felt like the avatar of every angry rock song. I wanted to be Thad Beaumont, locked in mortal combat with that horrifying inner George Stark -- or, maybe even better, to be Stark himself and win. At 31, my relationship with my own emotions is more nuanced. I only got this way, though, by trying things out and experimenting with reading and writing stories.

Insulating kids and treating them like hothouse flowers doesn't make strong adults. It makes adults who can't navigate a difficult, frightening, and often unforgiving world. You have to let them get dirty, have to let them engage, have to let them mess up. That doesn't necessarily mean to let them run wild and unsupervised. It means to be an active parent, to engage some of the material with them.

Not all of it -- I still have stomach turning flashbacks to my mom trying to engage me on the sexual themes in the booklets to Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion albums in the middle of a Chinese restaurant -- but enough of it that they get the general message. And then probably rebel anyway, but how else will they really understand?

To Gurdon and her ilk, I will say simply this: Censorship really isn't the answer. Thoughtful, engaged parenting (and teaching, and community participation) is. There's a reason people who would sanitize YA get smeared as "fucking gatekeepers." It's because they've rightly earned the derision of those of us who remember quite well all the ways books and other media that wasn't "nice" saved our lives.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com