You've Grown Up, So You Don't Have to Ask Permission to Read

I've been reading a bit online about how adults should read adult books or that they can read young-adult if they want. This confuses me. Why would someone want to dictate what others should read?

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be an adult because then, no one could tell me what to eat for dinner or what time to go to bed. If I wanted to eat Doritos and stay up until 1:00 a.m. every night, I could (Fact is, I eat broccoli and fall asleep at 9:30, but I digress). It never occurred to me that anyone would want to dictate what I read. In fact, I went through much of middle and high school reading adult classics like The Sound and the Fury (because, once you've read The Sound and the Fury, you can bring it up with every English teacher EVER), then started reading Lois Duncan and Sweet Dreams romances when I was in college.  No one told me I shouldn't.  Because there was absolutely no reason why I shouldn't.

It seems, to me, snooty beyond belief to tell adults that they should be ashamed of reading young-adult novels because they are "for children" (as an article to which I WILL NOT LINK) states.  Does the person who is saying this have any friends? Does she have any other standards for what people should be reading? Are people ostracized from her dinner parties if they read Confessions of a Shopaholic? How about John Grisham?  Is it better to read literary young-adult than Nora Roberts?

I'm in a book club, which is partly social and partly to get me reading something I might not read on my own. This means that I read a novel meant for adults at least ten times a year, sometimes more if I'm trying to select books to recommend.  Although I've also heard people make snotty comments about book clubs, mine reads everything from popular novels like Gone Girl to literary classics like The Woman in White to Pulitzer Prize winners like The Road or Olive Kitteridge. Our book list this year included the novel, Still Alice by Lisa Genova, which read very much like young-adult "problem fiction" except that it was about senility and The Light Between Oceans, a beautifully-written novel from which I could easily have cut 50-100 pages.

Honestly, if you asked me the main difference between young-adult and adult novels, I'd say the difference is twofold. The first is the age of the main character. In an adult novel, it is often an adult but sometimes, it is an adult looking back upon an experience he or she had as a teen. Examples of this include Conroy's The Great Santini, Bronte's Jane Eyre, and McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Any of these novels could, arguably have been published as YA, had the genre existed (or, in the case of the Conroy, been considered a good idea) at the time of their publication.  Similarly, many young-adult novels could be published as adult, were this distance added. Had John Green's The Fault in Our Stars been published as adult, for example, it would likely be a sort of memoir by the surviving character about the romance with the other character -- but that would give the ending away.

The other difference is, honestly, wordiness.  I'm not saying that every young-adult novel is shorter than every adult novel. Certainly, The Hunger Games is longer than Still Alice. Yet, there is an economy with words, inherent in the YA genre, that makes it easier to read. Often, when I read novels published for adults, I wonder if the authors felt they HAD TO make them a certain length -- and had to bash me in the face with certain things. It just seems like there's a certain amount of naval-gazing introspection that I just expect my readers to GET without my rubbing their faces in it.  And the description. I love Pat Conroy (and, when I had the pleasure of meeting him at this year's Miami Book Fair, he mentioned that he was writing a YA novel), but MAN, he can take a lot of paragraphs to say, "South Carolina is pretty."  When I read adult books, I often find myself thinking, "I know, I know."  A Light Between Oceans, for example, presented a dilemma from pretty much the first page. Then, it had the characters THINKING ABOUT it pretty much forever.

I am not used to thinking of economy of words as a bad thing. To me, it is easier to write a novel than to write poetry, because you get more words. If I didn't have to worry about boring my readers with my insights, that seems like it would be even easier.  But I don't need it to be easier. I like to write books I'd want to read, interesting books, which is why I write YA.

One of my heroes, Richard Peck, who pretty much founded the YA problem novel genre and a few other things, said that a young-adult novel is the story of a step, the story of a character learning something about the world or about him or herself and taking one step closer to becoming the person he is.  This is true of a lot of adult novels too, novels like The Great Gatsby or even Gone With the Wind. But it is true of pretty much every young-adult novel. And it is what I really love about this genre. Young-adult novels are not merely stories about what characters do or think or feel, but yes, about what they learn.  That's what I think is so satisfying about young-adult. Those of us who write for young-adults also know that we are reaching these readers at a time when what they are reading is most important to them. If we play our cards right, they will remember us forever.

Interestingly, over the years, I've heard of a lot of adult women who read my novel, Breathing Underwater, years after leaving their abusive dating relationship or marriage and say that it was cathartic, that they wish they'd read it as teens. Unfortunately, other than Sleeping With the Enemy-type stories, there's not a whole lot written about these topics for adults.  I'm glad they're reading it now.

Another reason why it seems odd to me to sneer at adults for reading YA is that a lot of fairly smart adults I know don't actually read novels at all. And then, I have some friends (math brain types, like accountants and a physicist, people who are WAAAAY smarter than I am at science-y, number-y type stuff) who read the type of books I stopped reading when I was twelve, stuff like Danielle Steele. So, to me, it seems hopelessly limiting to say that one has to be reading a 500-page tome about a midlife crisis to be intelligent.  Says who?

It is a common thing to ask those of us who write for kids or teens when they might write for adults. In my case, the answer is maybe never. To me, that magic time of life when everything is still before you just makes for good reading. And fun writing.  I've found that, even with adult novels, the ones I prefer tend to be the ones, like Conroy's, like Orphan Train, like Debra Dean's novel, The Mirrored World (another of this year's book club selections) which stay closer to that time period because it interests me.

I know that a lot of adults are reading YA anyway. But, if you need permission, go ahead. I give you permission. I give you permission to read interesting, concise books with strong plots and interesting characters. I give you permission to take time away from all your responsibilities for the time it takes to read a 300-page YA novel instead of a 500-page adult novel. And I give you permission not to ask permission.