(no subject)

[mistymassey]

I'm a little late to this party, since I was busy celebrating my son's graduation all day yesterday, but I wanted to share my thoughts on the WSJ article decrying the dark subjects of many popular YA books.

I, too, was one of those kids that nobody quite seemed to "get". I was short and round, I didn't have naturally gorgeous hair, I chewed my nails (any wonder why?) and I liked things everyone else thought were weird. I spent my junior high years being called names and treated cruelly. I remember the afternoon that I foolishly admitted to a girl I thought was a friend the name of the boy I was crushing on. Within seconds, the whole room knew, and the boy made a point of standing up and loudly declaring his disgust at the idea of me being anywhere near him ever again. Two afternoons a week I took riding lessons, and one day when I'd taken a bad fall and couldn't participate in gym, the teacher made a point of saying that "The earthquake we all felt yesterday was just Misty falling off a horse." Big laughs from everyone in class. School was hell. The only place I found solace was in the pages of the books I loved to read. If I hadn't had books...I don't even want to think about that.

So today's YA stories feature dark subject matter...well, duh. Of course they do. It's not that the world is harder now than it used to be - it's that we're finally admitting that horrible things happen. YA stories about bullying and cutting and eating disorders and sexual abuse may seem extreme to some people, but those books might be the only outlet for kids who suffer, to know that they're not alone.

Comments

[guinwhyte.livejournal.com]

People always seem to forget that the adults in a kid's life can be bullies too. (They also seem to be gym teachers a lot, for some reason.) Authority figures mocking/bullying you are particularly traumatizing, both because they are not supposed to be like that and because it "legitimizes" the other kids' behavior.

I, too, found a lot of my solace in books when I was young. Sometimes they were my best friends. Sometimes they still are. I turned to "grown-up" books pretty early on because there wasn't the range of YA (that there is now) when I was that age, so talk about the possibility for dark subject matter....and yet all that did was open me up to other places and ideas, sometimes experiencing vicariously things I was not likely to do myself, and becoming more sympathetic to all sorts of people. And it wasn't as if I didn't know people who got pregnant/did drugs/were bullied/were afraid for their lives/were abused/had mental health issues -- I did (and experienced some of it first-hand), but no one talked about it, and few wrote about it. I wish more of these sort of YA books had been around when I was that age, and considering that a number of YA writers are close to my age, that yearning might be why there are so many of them now. I'm glad kids have access to them, and I read some of them myself.

[baka-kit.livejournal.com]

I wish more of these sort of YA books had been around when I was that age, and considering that a number of YA writers are close to my age, that yearning might be why there are so many of them now.

I know that's why I've got a couple YA LGBT books I'm working on.

[eleika.livejournal.com]

That's horrible. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Teachers should at least be above saying that kind of stuff.

I, too, had a childhood of being ridiculed by everyone (not, thankfully, the teachers) and I experienced some other bad stuff that I was able to rise above, but not without a lot of self-work.

We (the room and the presenters) talked a bit about that article at the Writing YA panel at ConCarolinas. It was unanimously rejected.