Booklist - August 2017

56 Booklist August2017 www.booklistreader.com
it in eighth grade, and it sent me
reeling from the armchair experi-
ence of being incarcerated in a
mental institution. Deenie, by
Judy Blume, is a 1973 novel about
a girl with scoliosis and the journey toward self-acceptance she
goes on when she has to wear a back brace to school. A Hero
Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress, also 1973, is
about a boy’s descent into heroin addiction and his hope for
recovery. These YA books showed me other people’s pain. They
taught me empathy and bravery. They were the antecedents for
books like Walter Dean Myers’ Monster (1999), Laurie Halse
Anderson’s Speak (1999), An Na’s A Step from Heaven (2001),
Coe Booth’s Tyrell (2006), Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls (2011),
and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). All of them fea-
ture an enormous, heart-wrenching problem—and a protagonist
who must wrestle with it.

In 2002, I could not see past this model. I mention this idiotic notion of mine because “problem novels” are still the dominant lens through which many people view young adult fiction and its history and because I (like so many other readers) persisted in this stupid view, even though the evidence of my own reading didn’t support it. I believed it only because the stereotype that was out there in the ether, perpetuated by ill-researched magazine and newspaper articles and supported perhaps by the moody teenage faces on the covers of certain books. I clung to that wrongheaded notion despite the evidence on my own book-shelves.

I read M. T. Anderson’s Thirsty in 1997. Therefore, I knew that YA could be bloody and funny at once. I read Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries in 2000, so I knew that YA could be silly, romantic, and feminist at once. I read Melvin Burgess’ Lady: My Life as a Bitch in 2001, so I knew that YA could be dirty, amoral, and sensitive at once. But it wasn’t until at least a year later that I let go of the problem-novel stereotype enough to be able to see my way into writing YA, given my own limitations and strengths.

A different editor, Marissa Walsh, at Random, said she’d like to
see a book proposal from me. I was broke, and I figured I should
give it a try, so I went to Books of Wonder in New York City
and bought a stack of YA novels that included Angus, Thongs,

As a novelist, I am not particularly in the business of solutions, but rather in the business of questions. I’m in- terested not in writing books with messages but in saying things I can’t articulate in a simpler way. I always write morally gray characters, and in my new book, Genuine Fraud, I have written a morally dark one. And yet still, when I say that my job is “YA author,” people ask me what lesson I am peddling. “Tell us your message for young people today!”

Back in 2002, the third book I published was a novel for adults that was read by pretty few people. Those who read it liked the babysitter character best. She was confused and horny and lax about her responsibilities. She wasn’t very important to the story, but a number of people told me they’d like to read more about her. One of those was an editor I had already worked with, Donna Bray, now of Harper/Balzer+Bray. Would I want to write for young adults, she asked?

No, thank you. I didn’t. I had a stupid idea about YA literature back then. I thought all young adult novels were problem novels. Even though I like problem novels as a reader, and had benefited from reading them as a teenager, I knew I was incapable of writing one. I’m still incapable. My brain is a messier, sillier, angrier kind of brain.