Why Teens Should Read ‘Adult’ Fiction- and Vice-Versa
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When I was 14, I spent so much time browsing my local library’s YA fiction shelves, signing out The Babysitters Club books and Sweet Valley Highs - two series that were as popular with teens then as Hunger Games and Twilight are today. I dreaded what would become of my days once I’d read every book on the shelves that appealed to me: I would run out of books!
Of course, I knew there were books elsewhere in the library - on those other, forbidding shelves where the grown-ups browsed - but they seemed as dull and remote from me as certain items in the drugstore (what were bunions?). It was only when I did finally consume all the books - my favourites sometimes 10 times over - that I was forced to venture across the aisle. It was a journey that felt full of risk; its outcome mysterious and uncertain. The covers of the adult books had no useful drawings. I remember the hardcover I finally chose - its title slightly YA-ish - by Toronto author Susan Swan: The Last of the Golden Girls.
And I can still vividly recall that summer when I began reading “adult fiction,” lying on a towel at a public pool in the sun, the book open before me, my entire being deepening a notch. It deepened still more when I read Lolita from my parent’s basement; then, from the same dusty box, Gore Vidal’s gender-bending Myra Breckinridge, then the (to me, insanely hot) feminist tract Sexual Politics, by Kate Millet - skipping through to the good parts - which introduced to me Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. By September, when I entered the public library, the YA books now looked so childish, like they were for someone else; not me.
What surprises me most about YA books is not that adults are reading them in mass numbers (as with Hunger Games appearing on bestseller lists everywhere); it’s that they’re being marketed primarily to teens. Adults, it seems, are these books’ rightful audience; working adults are people who want, and maybe ought, to be diverted from their lives. It makes perfect sense for someone who has been in a repetitive job for decades, or whose home life is a series of responsibilities, to immerse themselves in other lands.
But teenagers - at least the teenagers I knew and know, and the teenager I happened to be - are not so world-weary. They’re still trying to figure out this place, this land, and to assimilate all the sensations that come with being a new sort of creature: suddenly not a child. When I started reading fiction like Kafka’s Metamorphosis (and who but a teenager is the perfect audience for Gregor’s alienation from his body and his family, waking up suddenly a bug?); or Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, with their subtle heartbreak and humour; or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with its haunting amorality and self-torture - I finally felt understood: These writers became my closest friends, able to articulate life and feelings in ways I was needing to, but could not.
What we tend to think of as “real” or “great” literature are just those books whose primary concern is our place in this confusing universe, and what sort of world or society this is, and existence and relationships and our deepest feelings and sex. All of this is conveyed in a style and form that is the most appropriate and best, with sentences that are simple and complex, messy and beautiful and true. Yet these books evoke suspicion - certainly in the mind of a teenager who doesn’t know any better - the same exact same way “the nice daughter of someone at work” might evoke suspicion in the mind of a boy whose mother wants to set him up.