Coming of Age

Coming of Age

I love the idea of the coming of age novel, because deciding to grow up, and the trauma that results, makes for some fine human conflict. It’s a natural internal and external conflict. You don’t need men with guns leaping out of the alley when you’re dealing with growing up.

I am also living with a son who is 19, and is taking his time. Like many young men today, he is giving this whole coming of age thing plenty of time to mature. He isn’t entirely sure it’s not some trick to turn his bedroom into a sewing room. I’m watching his struggles and thinking about what it means to come of age.

I had thought this was a teen issue, and for gay romance, a coming out issue. That may be, and many of the classic coming of age novels have teen protagonists and in our genre deal with coming out. But we never stop growing up. We never stop learning the lessons life teaches us. My favorite coming of age novel, A Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, deals with the lessons we learn when we are willful and stubborn and we don’t know as much as we think we do. I think this is the true coming of age, when we screw up as adults for the first time, and then decide what we’re going to do then.

I think love and war are the great crucibles for young adults- those things that either transform us into steel or crush us underfoot. Everything else we can leave behind us. For me, a good coming of age story is a young man wrestling with these things, and deciding who he is going to be for the rest of his life.

My new story, Marlowe’s Ghost, is my attempt at a coming of age story. I set the story in England and Italy, not in imitation of the great James novel, but because some of my own coming of age took place in these two countries. Unlike James, though, I did not leave the end for the reader to figure out. The screwed-up ending of Portrait of a Lady still ticks me off these many years later.

While I was writing this story, I also became a bit obsessed with Christopher Marlowe. I will confess now that I have firmly moved into the Marlovian camp, and will debate anyone on the reasons I think Christopher Marlowe wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. But that’s an argument for another day!
Marlowe’s Ghost is out 1/25 from Dreamspinner Press