There Are Whole Lives In These Bookshelves

Dear Ms Gurdon,

Your article about YA literature has become a huge topic of conversation with the YA community filled with bloggers, authors, librarians, teachers and publisher professionals alike.

When I saw one of my friends post your article on Facebook, I immediately clicked on the link and began to process your words in a two hour conversation with one of my best friends. Even after rehashing the main flaw in your argument - that if a parent disagrees with the subject matter within a book their child is reading, it is their responsibility to discuss and possibly restrict THEIR child from reading that book, not all children - I still felt like I had something to say on this matter. I think I just figured out why this article is leaving me, and possibly the rest of the YA community, blue in the face.

You speak of the book industry's outrage against book banning as if it's preposterous:

"...she meant those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment" or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks "censorship!"

If you were to look up the definition of what a censor is, you'd see "an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds." So while your article colours publishers' outrage about banning as overly dramatic, you're the one who fails to understand the concept of censorship.

But even that is beside my point. Several sentences in your essay seem to make the argument that YA literature is making teens become more destructive then they would be without the narratives in these books in the first place: "Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures."

With all due respect Ms. Gurdon, if you honestly believe that the darkness is too visible in teen literature, then you have never truly seen the teen perspective.

I have seen YA books expose darkness, reveal depth, find flaws, give hope, change minds, break hearts and then repair them. Good literature rips open all the private parts of us - the parts people like you have deemed too dark, inappropriate, grotesque or abnormal for teens to be feeling - and then they stitch it all back together again before we even realize they're not talking about us. They're talking about their characters.

You must not have met the anorexic, the self injurer, the rape or bully victim, the child who has to deal with their parent's alcoholism, the teen with a gay or mentally ill parent, the teen who is discovering their sexuality, learning about their culture, recently been victim of a hate crime, fallen in love with the wrong person, the right person at the wrong time, the traumatized, the abused, the scarred.

And what I find most insulting of all is that you think their voices will hurt teens who are only being exposed to their words.

Teenagers, contrary to popular belief, are not stupid. And I have not seen a YA writer in all of history who would want to leave their readers thinking that self injury - the example you give in your essay - is a good coping mechanism. We have minds with thoughts in our heads, as the friend I discussed your article with said last night. We can easily understand that authors are trying to prevent us from going down unhealthy paths, or redirect the path we're going down already.

And I fiercely believe with every part of me that the teen you mention - the one with a healthy home and school life who is entirely different from the scarred protagonist of the YA book they opened - will only be less judgmental, more open, educated and informed by the time they close the very same novel.

YA literature is creating a generation of less judgmental, more respectful and understanding adults right at this very moment, and you're too scared of the dark reading material that you didn't have as an adolescent to even notice.

Being exposed to a different narrative doesn't form your worldview to fit inside that different narrative. It does make you less scared of those with opinions and come from different backgrounds than you.

So I'll leave you with this: there are whole lives in these bookshelves. Readers see the insides of characters' minds, they see them make decisions, right or wrong, choose pathways, create relationships, start building their perspectives of the world around them. When they close the book, it's their time to pick and choose what fits their perception of the world, and put the nonsense back on the shelf.

If you begin to censor those lives, there are fewer opinions to pick from, worlds to discover, dark places to find in ink filled pages, people to fall in love with and find in this world of flesh and bone. There are less narratives to understand and embrace.

The darkness won't be visible at all anymore. And neither will the light.

PS: That aforementioned two hour conversation I had with one of my best friends can be summed up in three minutes. You can click this link if you want to hear two teenagers drivel over censorship, one intelligently, the other in a 1am haze of inarticulate sensation. I'm the bossy one at the beginning of the sound clip.