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weighing in on YA lit
Jun. 7th, 2011 02:35 pmDiane Duane shares some of her customary awesomeness and wisdom regarding the whole flap with what some twit of a WSJ op-ed contributor said about young adult literature being too "dark." And lest anyone think she's just defending her turf, she's also sharing her perspective as a former psychiatric professional.
Personally, I had a fairly run of the mill childhood and young-adult life, without any huge crises or problems. My parents divorced, it's true, but often seems more common than not, and the split was largely amicable, so while it was disruptive, disturbing, and frustrating, it was hardly as traumatic as a lot of things my classmates were probably going through. Yes, I was frequently moody, depressed, and melodramatic. I was, after all, a teenager, and a strange, socially awkward one at that. So I won't go into how YA "saved" me. It didn't.
What it did was make life infinitely more bearable, because even if you're not going through any of the thousand absolutely horrifying things that a lot of teens and young adults go through, for a lot of us, particularly if "us" is understood as geeky, perhaps even nerdy, bookish young people, being a teenager freaking sucked. Books and theater and my volunteer job at the local science center were absolutely the things that dragged me through and allowed me to come out as (relatively) sane and functional as I am. And the weird thing? As much as I devoured a lot of dark books with some really icky themes that, thinking back on it, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I absolutely craved at that age... I dunno, I seem to have turned out mostly okay. I'm not violent. I cringe at cartoon violence, for goodness sake. I get up 'to make some tea' and hide in the kitchen when a movie I'm watching has too much violence, and I flat refuse to see any movie I suspect might have a lot of gore or violence in theaters (because it's a lot harder to explain getting up, there, and because I have a vivid imagination, so covering my eyes really doesn't help much). Gasp, shock - I was not harmed by reading Jurassic Park and loads of other fairly graphic sci-fi novels and lots and lots of books about vampires back way before they sparkled and only killed animals. I loved that stuff. And yet I don't appear to have come out craving violence as an adult, or with some kind of bizarre idea of violence (or anything else that was depicted in those many, many books...) as normalized.
By all means, let's be concerned as a society about kids and what kind of influences the media is pushing on them. But, me personally? I'm a hell of a lot more concerned with reality TV and advertising than I'll ever be with a book.
Personally, I had a fairly run of the mill childhood and young-adult life, without any huge crises or problems. My parents divorced, it's true, but often seems more common than not, and the split was largely amicable, so while it was disruptive, disturbing, and frustrating, it was hardly as traumatic as a lot of things my classmates were probably going through. Yes, I was frequently moody, depressed, and melodramatic. I was, after all, a teenager, and a strange, socially awkward one at that. So I won't go into how YA "saved" me. It didn't.
What it did was make life infinitely more bearable, because even if you're not going through any of the thousand absolutely horrifying things that a lot of teens and young adults go through, for a lot of us, particularly if "us" is understood as geeky, perhaps even nerdy, bookish young people, being a teenager freaking sucked. Books and theater and my volunteer job at the local science center were absolutely the things that dragged me through and allowed me to come out as (relatively) sane and functional as I am. And the weird thing? As much as I devoured a lot of dark books with some really icky themes that, thinking back on it, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I absolutely craved at that age... I dunno, I seem to have turned out mostly okay. I'm not violent. I cringe at cartoon violence, for goodness sake. I get up 'to make some tea' and hide in the kitchen when a movie I'm watching has too much violence, and I flat refuse to see any movie I suspect might have a lot of gore or violence in theaters (because it's a lot harder to explain getting up, there, and because I have a vivid imagination, so covering my eyes really doesn't help much). Gasp, shock - I was not harmed by reading Jurassic Park and loads of other fairly graphic sci-fi novels and lots and lots of books about vampires back way before they sparkled and only killed animals. I loved that stuff. And yet I don't appear to have come out craving violence as an adult, or with some kind of bizarre idea of violence (or anything else that was depicted in those many, many books...) as normalized.
By all means, let's be concerned as a society about kids and what kind of influences the media is pushing on them. But, me personally? I'm a hell of a lot more concerned with reality TV and advertising than I'll ever be with a book.
