August 2005
Colleen Mondor
features
Attention Censors
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As the Bookslut blog has made us all aware, there has been a steady
upswing in banned and challenged books in school libraries lately. I paid only
casual attention to what goes on in Oklahoma and Arkansas (and Virginia and
Texas and…), until I read two books that would have set off all kinds
of alarms for groups like Parents Against Bad Books in Schools (no, I’m
not making that up). The Order of the Poison Oak by Brent Hartinger
depicts the summer camp experience of a gay teenager and his friends and Perfect,
by Natasha Friend describes the struggles of a young bulimic. In each case I
was impressed by how honestly the authors portrayed the lives of their teen
characters using a style that echoed what young adult author Kathe Koja wrote
me a few months ago: “There is no time of our lives that's more intense
than those teen years, where our heart's stakes are so very high.”
Writers who are drawn to the young adult age group know, however, that they
are mining troubled waters, and that their stories have the difficult task of
addressing the emotional turmoil of teenagers without collapsing under the weight
of adult themes. Add to this gay primary characters or a complicated illness
like bulimia and you might as well be turning on a blinking light that attracts
everyone who is afraid of boys and girls getting ideas (any ideas) from books.
It’s funny because young adult authors are often accused of not being
literary or serious enough when compared to authors writing for adult audiences.
I think that’s fairly ridiculous, because clearly when it comes to taking
chances with your stories, these are the writers who are swimming in the deep
end, and, more often than not, they willingly go back for more.
Brent Hartinger wrote his first book, Geography Club, in the 1990s,
and it was published in 2001. In Geography, Russel, who is gay, and
his close friends start a club at their high school so other gay, bisexual and
lesbian teens can be part of a group that understands what it is like to have
to live a lie about their sexuality. They call themselves the Geography Club
in the hopes that other students will be too bored by the premise to join. (The
club is open to straight friends, but they are all collectively concerned about
protecting their privacy from the larger school.) Of course everything gets
complicated very quickly (this is high school after all), but the book reads
more like a young adult buddy picture than anything else. Hartinger is a master
at crafting a high school setting, and Russel, Min, Gunnar and all the rest
are just great characters. They reminded me of my group of friends when I was
16, because more than anything they just want to make their way through the
insanity that is high school without losing their minds (or, in a few cases,
without getting the crap kicked out of themselves). Is it a gay book? Does it
advocate the “homosexual lifestyle”? Will it make you gay by reading
it? Heaven help me.
The brand new Order of the Poison Oak is the sequel to Geography
and follows our group of misfits through summer vacation and camp, and everything
that camp entails. There is romance and there are broken hearts and Russel is
still gay and his friend Min is still bi. That means this is still a book about
gay teens, and Hartinger is still treading water. But as he has become more
successful, he has found himself forced to become more aware of just what it
means to write about gay kids:
“I do think about these things [choosing a controversial subject matter]
when I’m writing now, but I didn’t when I was writing Geography
Club, in part because I was naïve, and in part because the world has
become much more socially conservative since then (2001). That said, ‘push
the envelope’ concerns are never in my mind, even now. I write what I
think the story dictates and needs. With Poison Oak, I knew the book
was a little more explicit than my first two books. But I also knew that it
was set at a summer camp, so some skinny-dipping seemed required, not
to mention summer romance. I knew I wanted to pursue that aspect of Russel’s
social development and I wanted to talk about safer sex, which will be an issue
for virtually all young gay men eventually. The third and fourth books
in the series, which I’m writing right now, aren’t sexual at all;
they’re about Russel’s coming out to his parents. But I have no
regrets that I wrote the book I did, and the reader response has been 100 percent
appreciative.”
That positive reader response is a key reason why Natasha Friend believes she
is on the right track with her novel about grief and bulimia, Perfect.
But because she has written so honestly about the disorder and graphically depicted
just how a bulimic binges and purges, she has run into her own set of difficulties.
Perfect is a middle-grade novel, aimed at an audience between roughly
the ages of 9 and 14. As Friend put it to me in a recent email, “I knew
that writing about eating disorders for a middle-grade audience was going to
get some people’s panties in a twist or at least raise some eyebrows.
Who wants to think about their 11-year-old daughter or fifth-grade student sticking
her fingers down her throat after lunch? But the reality is that younger and
younger girls are developing warped body images and disordered eating habits,
and the best time to catch them before the point of no return is when they’re
young, before self-destructive habits become thoroughly entrenched.”
But still, as Friend acknowledges, not everyone wants to accept or believe that
her book is necessary. She has “run into a number of roadblocks, promotion-wise,
particularly with schools.” What’s funny about all this is that
while Friend believes firmly that knowledge is power, she has to wonder just
what people think her book is going to do to its readers. As she puts it, “Some
educators fear that teaching about eating disorders in effect may be teaching
kids to develop eating disorders. (Perfect as how-to-guide. ‘Look,
kids, isn’t bulimia awesome?’)” After reading the book you
will know that message is simply not found anywhere in the text; in fact bulimia
is portrayed as something downright terrifying through the eyes of Isabelle
and the actions of both herself and her friend Ashley.
All too often though, both Friend and Hartinger must deal not with what they
have actually written but with what other people think their books might mean,
or could mean. They have to deal with a thousand different ways in which their
words may be twisted and perceived by people they have never met and who have
no desire to meet them. This is a situation that adult authors rarely find themselves
embroiled in, but something that comes all too often with the young adult territory.
For Hartinger it has been particularly difficult:
“...the problem with some of these folks is the very existence
of gay people. Books that portray gay people as normal, as well-adjusted, as
happy -- as anything other than ‘perverts’ -- well, that’s
the threat to the message they want to send to kids, which is basically the
message that existed in the 1950s, prior to 50 years of research on the subject
of homosexuality. My opinion is that my books pretty accurately reflect my experience
as a gay teen, and the experience of thousands of people who have written to
me. To say that my books should not exist is to say this information, this very
valid take on the world, should be censored.”
This determination to accurately reflect true experience is echoed by Friend
who writes, “I believe that I -- and any other author who chooses to --
can have a positive impact on today’s young readers by broaching tough,
even taboo topics in an accessible way. Judy Blume did that, for hundreds of
thousands (millions?) of readers in the '70s and '80s and continues to today.
I’m not necessarily setting out to write about specific problems or to
tackle controversial subject matter, but I’m also not afraid of a little
resistance from the adult world.”
It’s good that Friend isn’t afraid to face such resistance, because
a large and vocal segment of the population isn’t giving her much of a
choice. It is ironic that the fast-selling Clique and Gossip Girls series (the
“equivalent of the Desperate Housewives for the teen set,”
according to Friend) are the acceptable standard, while problem books like Perfect
or Hartinger’s other title, about a group home for foster children,
The Last Chance Texaco, are considered outside of the mainstream. Even
Harry Potter (could there be a more mainstream series than that?) faces
continuous challenges throughout the United States. And while I admire both
Friend and Hartinger (and Chris Crutcher and James Howe and all the others)
for sticking to their guns and writing for an audience that is desperate to
be heard, I can’t help but think that this is all really too hard. Both
Hartinger and Friend could have written books for adult audiences similar to
the ones they published, and they would have been easily accepted, perhaps even
lauded, by readers everywhere. But they chose not to do that and have been steadily
learning how to cope with the ramifications of that decision.
Natasha Friend was certain all along that Perfect would be for young
adults, as one of her primary missions from the beginning was to “jump-start
a dialogue among young girls about the issues raised in the book: namely, body
image and eating disorders.”
For Brent Hartinger the choice was made more by his teen protagonists than anything
else. As he puts it, “…since so many of my books were about teenage
characters, and since I liked so many of the existing teen books, well, maybe
I was a good fit for the Y.A. genre. Duh.” Their individual decisions
to write for young adult audiences have probably transformed their work in ways
they never imagined. Most certainly it has to have changed the ways in which
they view the world around them, because their readers are so dependent upon
them to provide a mirror for their own solitary dreams and disasters. Friend,
for example, has heard from many readers who are concerned about themselves
or their friends and looking for guidance...guidance that they are clearly not
comfortable searching for at home.
And maybe that is why so many of these books by authors like Hartinger and Friend
are banned and challenged in America. It is not so much that the stories show
readers something their parents don’t want them to see, but that readers
identify with the books so strongly that they turn to the characters and writers
for reassurance, and turn away from their own families. Maybe it’s all
about control in the end--control of what we read, what we do, what we think--and
it begins when we are too young to even realize that it’s happening.
Ultimately Brent Hartinger and Natasha Friend have written four books between
them that have great plots, believable family drama and all the angst that goes
along with the teenage years. Some of the kids are quietly desperate for help
while others are bravely charging into the dark, determined to make their way
even if no one else will help them. One common thread for both authors, though,
was recently expressed by Hartinger when I asked him why he wrote books for
young adult audiences. “In all of my books so far, there is a moment when
many of my characters, and especially my main characters, are confronted
with a choice: They can stick up for something that is greater than themselves,
or they can be selfish and do what will make them happy," Hartinger
says. "In other words, they can move beyond their own little bubble, or
not.”
Brent leads his characters into the wider world just as Natasha leads hers,
and their readers are carried along with them. For anyone who has ever felt
isolated or afraid or overwhelmed by everything that surrounds them, these two
authors provide an excellent path out of life’s chaos. And for everyone
who thinks they reveal too much, then there is always a different place for
them to go. They can leave the libraries to the rest of us who want to learn
and know and understand. They can go put their heads in the sand while the rest
of us are out here living. Or better yet, they can let Brent Hartinger and Natasha
Friend and all the other fearless young adult authors show kids everywhere that
growing up is not such a bad thing, no matter who you are or where you are or
what you feel. "You are not alone," they are saying with their books,
"you are never alone." And readers everywhere, both young and old,
should be grateful to them for that. Anyone who loves a good, brave book should
be grateful.
Perfect by Natasha Friend
Milkweed Editions
ISBN 1571316523
172 pages
Geography Club by Brent Hartinger
Harper Tempest
ISBN 0060012234
226 pages
The Last Chance Texaco by Brent Hartinger
Harper Tempest
ISBN 0060509120
225 pages
The Order of the Poison Oak by Brent Hartinger
Harper Tempest
ISBN 0060567309
211 pages
