YA

I have a couple short stories sitting on my hard drive that kind of read as YA and kind of don't because they're a little too "mature." I think at fourteen or fifteen, I would have appreciated it, and I'm pretty much aware that it's what I've been doing all along -- trying to write the stuff I wish were available when I was a teen because young adult lit wasn't nearly the industry it is today.

Sweet Valley High was it in sixth and seventh grade. I once said to someone -- rather flippantly -- that no one I knew would be caught dead reading those after junior high. "I read them in high school," she said. My mistake. But it was true. By high school, those were considered "baby books." That they were marketed exclusively to girls was a big part of it. Anything marketed to girls is automatically assumed to be silly and superfluous -- not "real" literature. I didn't read much for pleasure when I was in high school, or even college for that matter. Syllabi provided most of reading material, and when it was good it was good. I got the "cool" English teacher who gave us Catcher in the Rye. I went back and read it again when I was in my mid-twenties, and it was not as good as I remembered it, but at fifteen, I was floored that someone could write a book like that.

It's too bad I couldn't have found a distaff Holden Caulfield back then. Esther Greenwood, maybe? Frankie from Member of the Wedding gets closer, but the choices were limited to whatever was assigned that semester. Twenty-five years ago, books for teens that actually spoke to teenagers as if they were people capable of independent thought were either rare or just unmarketable.