Malinda Lo
Blog
Jun 6, 2011
The Moral of the Story
Over the weekend the YA community was slapped in the face yet again by a major mainstream news source, when the Wall Street Journal published a review essay in its Books section titled “Darkness Too Visible” by Meghan Cox Gurdon. The teaser stated: “Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?”
That teaser pretty much sums up the attitude of the essay: derisive and judgmental. This isn’t surprising — YA is bashed all over the place. (In fact, just a few weeks earlier, it was a review essay in the New York Times doing the bashing.) What did surprise me was the massive outpouring of YA-positive support on Twitter, which resulted in a #YAsaves hashtag that became one of the top trending tweets worldwide several times over the weekend.
On the #YAsaves twitter stream, readers and writers of YA shared their own stories about how YA novels that have dealt with difficult subject matter like rape, drug use, and homophobia have helped them as human beings. It’s an inspiring stream to read.
But I’m not interested, today, in blogging about how YA saves lives, or even in defending young adult fiction.1 What interests me are the assumptions that repeatedly emerge from the discourse about young adult fiction.
There is an underlying assumption that YA literature exists to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to give moral guidance to teens. The New York Times essay goes so far as to lay it all out in the first sentence:
“The purpose of young adult literature is often twofold: to tell a story, and to send a message, usually in the form of a much-needed lesson.”
Though Gurdon’s essay in the Wall Street Journal doesn’t state it quite so bluntly, the attitude underlying her entire piece is the belief that some subjects are just too awful for teens to read about, because teens are simply too young and impressionable, and they may be influenced by these horrible stories. Gurdon writes:
“It is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.”
The subtext of Gurdon’s essay is that YA literature has a responsibility to teens to show them a moral world. The problem is: Whose morals? Gurdon wants her morals to be illustrated in YA, but I’m pretty sure hers are not mine.2
Even the #YAsaves stream is buoyed to some extent by this belief. It is a river of testimonials about how YA has shown a reader the truth, has given them succor in a time of pain, has handed them a compass with which to guide themselves. It’s an inspiring stream of tweets, yes, but it also underscores the idea that YA has a purpose: to save.
I have such mixed feelings about this. I think that all art — even mass-marketed, overhyped Hollywood blockbuster “art” — has the ability to save. Art is about making connections between individuals. It’s about breaking down the barriers between one person’s skin and another’s. And when it succeeds in doing that, it does save. It saves people from loneliness; it saves people from boredom; it saves people from harming themselves because they’d rather watch another few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.3
But as a writer, the idea that YA is about saving people makes me cringe.
Practically every other interview I do about my books involves someone asking me what message I want readers to get from my novels. I’ve come up with a variety of ways to circumvent answering the question, but it’s crystal clear to me that readers — even bloggers within the YA blogosphere (I’m talking about everyone from book bloggers to professional journalists) — believe that YA novels have lessons in them. There seems to be an unshakeable belief that there must always be a moral to the story in children’s literature. Even though YA strains at the border between literature for children and adults (or perhaps because it does), it is not exempt from the mandate to deliver a moral.
Let me tell you, this is not the reason I am writing young adult fiction. If I really wanted to teach teens about how to be good human beings, I would become a teacher or a religious leader or, hell, a parent. I am none of the above.
The idea that morals are required is the thing I hate the most about YA. It’s the thing that makes writers of “adult fiction” look down on YA: the idea that YA’s only purpose is to teach a lesson, not to tell a damn good story. I think this idea is pretty much the most harmful idea out there about YA — not that it’s too dark or too full of “aesthetic coarseness” (Gurdon’s words). Because the idea that YA is primarily about lessons strips it of the possibility of being art, and therefore of being taken seriously. It turns it into moral pablum.
Many people have written to me to say that reading Ash or Huntress helped them feel better about being gay, and I’m moved by every one of these emails. Yes, it’s totally OK to be gay, but I didn’t write the books to teach that lesson. I wrote them coming from a place where, damn straight, it’s OK to be gay, so why the hell don’t I write a story about lesbians? That’s the difference.
Like everything worth discussing, YA fiction is full of shades of grey. I know that some writers do in fact believe they’re writing books to save teens. But I’m not.
I’m writing books to explore my place in the world. To ask questions about life and to understand what it means to love another person. And most importantly: I’m writing to tell damn good stories to people who want to read them. YA or not.
- I don’t think YA needs defending. It’s one of the only segments of the publishing industry that is successful these days. Readers love YA. And like every other category of fiction, some YA books are wonderful and others are not. [↩]
- Especially since she divides up her YA recommendations into gendered lists: “Books For Young Men” and “Books For Young Women.” Ugh. [↩]
- Most brilliant TV show ever! [↩]
What I said on my blog:
“Young adult literature is[...]raw and brash and brazen. It’s trashy, silly, funny and beautiful. It’s stomach-churing, harrowing and dark. It’s subtle, complex, transformative and brave.
It’s ART, for God’s sake. What do you expect?”
And thank God fo that.
Malinda, this is wonderful. When I read Huntress, I knew you’d be one of those authors whose work I’d always put on pre-order lists. At that point, I’d only read a few blog posts about the book itself. As I’ve started reading your regular posts, I’m constantly moved by the ways you put this stuff into words, and the passion with which you defend both the subjects in your work and your readers. Thank you for your voice.
Your paragraph about the job of art is spot-on, but so is everything else, of course. And “whose morals?” is exactly the right question to ask. Let’s be in it for the story, for the exploration. What this article also says is that it’s not OK to explore the dark parts of life, to pull them out and give them some air time. Whatever.
“The subtext of Gurdon’s essay is that YA literature has a responsibility to teens to show them a moral world. The problem is: Whose morals? Gurdon wants her morals to be illustrated in YA, but I’m pretty sure hers are not mine.”
This hits at the heart of the whole YA debate, for me. When we talk about the conservatism, sexism or negative culture of certain books – or the positive, progressive, life-affirming culture of others – we are always talking about morality, or culture, or some other subjective admixture thereof as relative to our own worldview. It’s a hugely contrary business: on the one hand, innumerable blogs and articles talk about how sexist themes in some YA novels are sending teenage girls bad messages (for instance); and then on the other, controversies like this most recent one create outraged by suggesting that YA novels might impart negative values to teenage readers.
And I think, well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Both sides believe in the power of books to influence readers, because it’s a power they undeniably have. It’s not like we disagree about the ability of one YA novel or other to influence a teenager’s beliefs about homosexuality or feminism: it’s that we disagree about what those issues mean, whether they’re good or bad things. And so we end up in this contradictory space of arguing that books can’t possibly incite bad behaviour by our definition because they’re too busy inciting goodness, and it’s like, what? Do we not see the glitch, here?
The uncomfortable truth is that books don’t always say what we, as authors, want them to. Once the words are out there, every reader will make up her or his own mind about what they mean, and form opinions accordingly, regardless of any moral intentions we may (or may not) have had. That’s something we all need to come to terms with, I think – so that when it comes to arguments like this, we’re not just saying that books only teach Good Lessons, not Bad Lessons, or that Good Books are preferable to Bad Books (because this is exactly what the other side is saying, only with different definitions of good and bad) but that regardless of our individual moral compasses, it is better to take the risk that readers will come to a conclusion we disagree with via a process of independent thought than to write so didactically for whatever perspective as to doubt their capacity for critical reasoning.
In other words: teenagers read, and teenagers think. What we write is not always what they read, and we can’t control that any more than we can suddenly make the whole world spin on a reversed axis. Fighting for representative fiction is not the same as saying Thou Shalt Not Tell (Or Only Tell) A Certain Type Of Story – it’s arguing that all types of story, even the ones we might criticise, are valid, because they make the reader think and feel, not something particular, but at all.
Anyway, shutting up now: this all made sense in my head, so I’m hoping it does to other people, too.
I thought the purpose of Young Adult novels was to get Young Adults to read. Silly me.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not, but think of it this way: Is the purpose of adult novels to get adults to read? I don’t actually think so.
It totally made sense to me! And I especially appreciated this part:
YES. This is what bugs me about the “YA is bad — no wait, YA is GREAT!” debates. There is an inherent problem with the logic behind that debate.
Thank you so much! And you’re welcome.
I agree with you 100%
I say it again and again. Writers tell stories and through that, reflect some aspect of humanity.
THAT is our job.
Not teaching.
Not preaching.
Not to provide children with life lessons.
Not to heal.
In fact, I’m going to put my neck out and say that people that think that any of the above are a good idea when it comes to YA 1) are beyond presumptuous and 2) don’t know their market.
Justine (Larbalestier) and I were emailing back and forth about this very thing.
It may be a hideous thing to say, but a lot of the time my motivation is selfish: does this make my story more fun for me to write and more awesome for me to think about? If the answer is yes, proceed, and hope the reader has fun along with you!
I definitely don’t think YA should be dedicated to teaching a lesson, if it unconsciously does then that’s great. For example a lot of YA chick lit isn’t about teaching a lesson, it’s just fun. But some of those books have taught me a bit about how relationships shouldn’t (and should) be handled. Fantasy transports you to another world and allows you to really use your imagination so I guess it teaches you to dream but that’s it. Constantly having to look for meanings in books is what makes English class so tiresome. Thank goodness I don’t have to do that for YA
Yes, I think that’s the motivation for most fiction writing: selfishness!!
“Constantly having to look for meanings in books is what makes English class so tiresome.”
And this is why I could never be an English major. LOL.
Mmm I do so love reading your intelligent blog posts, Malinda. You bring up a good question of the problems inherent in the hashtag name. I wonder if maybe it’s not *the literature* that has inherent “saving” power, but more that more often than not the mindset of a YA lit reader is such that the reader is aware of the uncertainties/ambiguities/questions of life, and in exploring art, communication, discourse, what have you, begins to craft answers to his/her questions. I’ve been wondering at the “power” of reading a particular book at the right time, age, mindset, etc. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of our favorite and most influential books were first read when we were young, right? Therefore, it’s not that *YA* saves, but rather that a reader with those uncertainties/ambiguities/questions can consider him- or herself “saved” with whatever art or discourse he or she happens to encounter at the optimal time.
I shall have to think about this much more…
I think you’re right that children and teen readers do approach novels with a different mindset than many adults do. And yes, many books we read as young people can seem life-changing in a way that does not happen when you’re older. But I think that’s also partly due to the fact that in our society, as adults we are generally believed to be fixed — with our personalities wholly formed. I think that’s false. If, as an adult, you approach the world with a more flexible and changeable outlook, I think you can still find those transformative reading experiences. But they might be about different subjects than what would have affected you as a child (in fact, they probably should be).
Excellent response! I’ve been lurking at your blog and just love everything you have to say. Finally had to stop lurking, add you to my blogroll, and comment. Keep up the excellence!