he whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
I’ve been meaning to write for weeks, but, you know, things happened: I read a picturebook about a highway-rat, complete with coat of claret velvet and lace at his little rat chin. I started reading I, Claudius because I picked it up off a dollar cart and got twenty percent off for identifying that week’s guess-the-quote (the Aeneid, Arma virumque cano etc). I finished watching Flower Boy Next Door and King of Dramas, and I was going to write last night, but then I thought, no, I’ll just check out the first episode of Answer Me, 1997, I probably won’t like it because I won’t get the ‘90s k-pop references but we’ll just see.
In retrospect, I should have known better. JUST TAKE MY HEART, I WASN’T USING IT ANYWAY.
Mind you, I said the same thing three days ago when I read Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. (It’s Big News now that John Green reviewed it in the New York Times, and that review and my reaction are an excellent example of vastly differing reader communities. We both loved it, but wow, it’s like we read entirely different books. You should read it too: there’s an awkward, magnificent, Romeo-&-Juliet-hating curly redhead, an eyeliner-wearing comic-reading half-Korean, epic explosions of adorableness and angst, all set to a soundtrack of terrible parenting and the Smiths.)
Actually these two stories are very similar in certain ways: they so perfectly embody the awkwardness, the intensity of being a teenager in a not-so-long-ago age (Eleanor & Park takes place in 1986; Answer Me, 1997 takes place in, obviously, 1997). Both stories are about growing up-that long liminal moment between dependence and independence. They’re about family, first love (true love?), and-of course-music.
They’re about a time in life that-if we’ve had the privilege of experiencing it (and so many young people haven’t, or experience it differently than I did and the characters in these stories do)-we’re expected to leave behind. But that shouldn’t mean we ignore it completely, and I think a lot of people read YA partly because, on some level, teenagerhood informs the rest of our lives, and the things we start working through then don’t just disappear because we hit twenty. This doesn’t mean adult readers of YA are immature or incapable of handling adulthood. It means, perhaps, that we’re still in touch with our younger selves in a way that demands some level of engagement. That questions about identity, family, love, one’s place in the world-that these are universal and ageless, in narrative just as much as in non-narrative philosophy; in living YA just as much as in anything written by dead white dudes.
That’s not the only reason for adults to read or write or edit YA, of course. But it is one that I think deserves a little more credit than it generally gets. It’s more usually phrased as the self-deprecatory “Well, I guess I’m still a teenager at heart”-but I think it demands (and deserves) more examination than that.
In retrospect, I should have known better. JUST TAKE MY HEART, I WASN’T USING IT ANYWAY.
Mind you, I said the same thing three days ago when I read Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. (It’s Big News now that John Green reviewed it in the New York Times, and that review and my reaction are an excellent example of vastly differing reader communities. We both loved it, but wow, it’s like we read entirely different books. You should read it too: there’s an awkward, magnificent, Romeo-&-Juliet-hating curly redhead, an eyeliner-wearing comic-reading half-Korean, epic explosions of adorableness and angst, all set to a soundtrack of terrible parenting and the Smiths.)
Actually these two stories are very similar in certain ways: they so perfectly embody the awkwardness, the intensity of being a teenager in a not-so-long-ago age (Eleanor & Park takes place in 1986; Answer Me, 1997 takes place in, obviously, 1997). Both stories are about growing up-that long liminal moment between dependence and independence. They’re about family, first love (true love?), and-of course-music.
They’re about a time in life that-if we’ve had the privilege of experiencing it (and so many young people haven’t, or experience it differently than I did and the characters in these stories do)-we’re expected to leave behind. But that shouldn’t mean we ignore it completely, and I think a lot of people read YA partly because, on some level, teenagerhood informs the rest of our lives, and the things we start working through then don’t just disappear because we hit twenty. This doesn’t mean adult readers of YA are immature or incapable of handling adulthood. It means, perhaps, that we’re still in touch with our younger selves in a way that demands some level of engagement. That questions about identity, family, love, one’s place in the world-that these are universal and ageless, in narrative just as much as in non-narrative philosophy; in living YA just as much as in anything written by dead white dudes.
That’s not the only reason for adults to read or write or edit YA, of course. But it is one that I think deserves a little more credit than it generally gets. It’s more usually phrased as the self-deprecatory “Well, I guess I’m still a teenager at heart”-but I think it demands (and deserves) more examination than that.