Contemporary fiction for teenagers is much more
controversial than when I was a child. Dark subjects such as suicide, incest, rape
and brutality are now featured in many novels directed at children from ages 12
years and up. If books show us the world, teen fiction can reflect portrayals
of what contemporary life is and how it is also portrayed in the media and in
movies. Young readers often find themselves surrounded by images not of joy or
beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds. So
what responsibility, if any, does an author have when it comes to depicting
controversial content?
I am guilty of writing about dark subjects in my YA novels: The Last Refuge (domestic violence), Crossing the Line (self-mutilation and
stalking), and The Girl in the Basement
(kidnapping and murder). I didn’t set out to write controversial subject
matter; what I’ve written in these books, and what I write in most of my
social-realism novels generally comes from my own life experience or my
observations of and reflections on what is happening about me in the society in
which I live.
The Last Refuge,
about children who are witnesses to domestic violence, comes from my childhood
experience. I wasn’t just a witness; I was physically assaulted by my father,
as were my siblings and my mother. I didn’t know as a young person that others
suffered like this, too, at the hands of family members. If I had read The Last Refuge as a teenager, I would
have known ours was not the only family which suffered. And, too, I would have found out that there were refuges to
which women and their children could flee to (something else I didn’t know).
I was also unaware that other confused and damaged young
people cut themselves, as I did as a teenager and as Sophie does in Crossing the Line. In writing this
novel, I also drew on my experiences as a person with a mental illness (I have
bipolar disorder). This gave authenticity to scenes inside a psychiatric
hospital ward and dealings with staff, in particular with a psychiatrist who
metaphorically crossed the doctor-patient line. Was the book a catharsis? I’d be
lying if I said it wasn’t. But I’m also aware that when a book comes from the
author’s own experience, it has a genuine authenticity that an astute reader
can pick up on. When the book was released, I was inundated by adults who told
me that they had self-mutilated as teenagers, and when I spoke to teenagers in
high schools invariably there were girls who admitted knowing peers who did
this, too. I had a few letters/emails from teenage girls who confided in me
their self-harming, and so I was able to offer them comfort and advice.
Incidentally, my husband, Bill Condon, who is a
prize-winning YA author, had a long correspondence with a teenage girl who
wrote to tell him about losing her virginity, something she hadn’t even told
any of her friends or family. She was responding to the emotional truth in one
of his novels, Dare Devils.
My third YA novel, The Girl in the Basement, was
coincidentally released the same week that the three young women escaped from
their long-term captivity in a house in Cleveland Ohio at the hands of a perverted
monster. This book’s genesis came from a newspaper clipping I’d kept for years
about a teenage girl and a seven-year old boy who had disappeared from their
respective homes some months before a Polaroid photo of the two, bound and
gagged, was discovered in a Florida car-park. Though my circumstances were
different, as a child I knew what it was like to be held prisoner to a madman
father so I was able to draw on those experiences. (And I knew how it feels to
want to murder someone!)
Whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in
ugliness or in beauty that is in books probably depends on your philosophical
outlook. My take is that reading about homicide doesn't turn a person into a
murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid go ahead and do this;
no teenager is going to take up smoking because a character in a book smokes,
and so on. Today’s teenagers are a part of a society in which bad things
happen. They see it first-hand in day-to-day life; they watch it on television;
they read about it in magazines and in newspapers. How they grow and develop is not dependent on
any single book they read, but it is a combination of factors, not the least of
which is the effect of the moral environment in which they are raised. Parents
have far more influence in steering a child’s passage into adulthood than any
other single factor.
Fifty years ago when I was a teenager, no-one had to contend
with young-adult literature because there was no such thing. There was simply
literature, some of it accessible to young readers and some not. Since the
1960s books have been published that deal directly with subjects such as family
dysfunction, disaffected youth, drug abuse, alcoholism and so forth. Society
has changed and those who practice in the creative arts reflect this in their
works. We cannot present life as being candy-coated when it’s not. What I hope
to do as a responsible author is to show how my fictional characters cope with
darkness in their lives and how they can emerge with solutions, and ultimately
with hope for a better life outcome.
