What if It's Us?, by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

[Ulysses]

What If It’s Us?
By Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera
Balzer + Bray / Harper Teen, 2018
Five stars

“I don’t know if we’re a love story or a story about love.”

Right up front: this book brought tears to my eyes at the end. It channeled all the trauma of being a teenager, as well as the joy of coming out at last. The story of Ben and Arthur should be entirely different from my own story – they could practically be my grandchildren. But no, it resonated deeply in me, both as a gay man, and a father.

I am intensely cynical when I approach young adult novels from mainstream publishers, particularly when they have gay content. Why? Not sure, but I think it’s because so many mainstream publishers ignore so much great LGBT content, I automatically wonder “why this book?” Is it because it’s safe, acceptable, within received norms as to how much gay is ok?

Being a gay teenager in high school in the very early seventies was awful. Nobody was out. Everyone was afraid. My own experience was not technically that bad, but in retrospect, I was as confused and frightened and isolated as any closeted gay teen at the time. The closet was the default for all of us. Of course, I didn’t have books like this back then. I had The Boys in the Band.

Albertalli and Silvera create a lovely rhythm with the structure of this book, alternating between the viewpoints of Puerto Rican Ben from Manhattan and Jewish Arthur from ex-urban Atlanta. These seventeen-year-olds are fully fleshed-out, richly dimensional. They observe the world around them closely, and they respond to it. Most importantly of all, they have parents they love (in that eye-rolling teenaged way) and friends who matter hugely in their lives. We see through these boys’ eyes, and we see a lot.

The futility of high-school romances is sort of at the center of this book, but I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The interplay between Ben’s wounded cynicism and Arthur’s starry-eyed romanticism is critical to their relationship with each other, but it’s also essential in their relationship to their friends – Jessie and Ethan for Arthur, and the more complex quartet of Dylan, Harriet, Hudson and Samantha for Ben. All these young people need each other but are groping forward in their hormone-infused teen lives to figure out how the different kinds of love – love of family, love of friends, romantic love – are going to be part of them. It is confusing and aggravating and frightening. Which, as I remember if I think very hard on my own high-school years, is exactly right.

I want to say that there’s no “happy ending” for this book, but in fact there is: it’s just not the kind of happy ending we as a culture are primed to see in a romantic story. I will give no detail, but suffice it to say that as I ended this book, blinking away tears, I felt hopeful and comforted. Maturity is something I wasn’t looking for in these pages, and its discovery therein was an unexpected gift.