YA saves. You bet it does
Jun. 9th, 2011 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishSome of you, dear readers may have heard about the Wall Street Journal article titled "Darkness too Visible" about how terrible all this dark violent YA literature is with its vampires, rape, and misery. Aside from the fact that I think the author's real issue is with victims who don't hide their victimization away, where she can ignore it, I have some serious issues with the idea that children need to be protected from dark books when we're not all that good at protecting them from dark lives.
What follows may be triggering to some of you. I talk about stalking, attempted rape, severe childhood illness, suicide, emotional child abuse, and drug addiction.
I never considered myself to have had a particularly dark adolescence. Maybe it was because my childhood was so awful, or maybe it was because I was surrounded by friends with horrible adolescences in high school, so I was lucky enough to fit right in. Maybe it was because my family was so unbelievably great. I have an addict in my close family. I won't tell you who, in case I ever use my real name on this blog, but I love him dearly, and he has been using since I was a small child. He's currently clean, but we never know how long it will last. To me, even though he is very close to me, this was background noise. It might have left the cops banging on our door trying to find him (small town cops are vindictive) it might have come close to costing my father his job. It might have left me afraid of one of the people I love most dying on the floor of his filthy apartment of an overdose, but it had to be background noise, because I spent every day struggling not to die.
My whole life I had something wrong with me. We didn't know what it was, only that I kept suddenly not being able to speak or recognize my family. Suddenly, I would run, and hit them, and fight when they tried to keep me from running into the street. My heart would race, and my eyes would glaze over, and then, hours later, it would be over, and I would be sobbing helplessly in my mother's arms, unable to remember a thing, except that it must have been horrible. I was sick all the time. I could barely remember my name on good days, and I always had some kind of infection. I was diagnosed with autism, childhood schizophrenia, a host of behavioral problems, and "just being spoiled" by different doctors and psychologists. My teachers favored the latter diagnosis, when they weren't convinced my family was abusing me.
I entered third grade barely able to read words like "cat" and "boy", with no friends, and having two or three several hour long "episodes" (my family called them temper tantrums) a day. My family was still trying to control them with rewards and punishments and keeping me calm. Now, anger and fear tended to bring on the episodes, because severe emotional stress is a common preceding factor for seizures in many seizure disorders. Because that's what I was having. Not fits of rage, not hallucinations, not manifestations of parental abuse, but seizures. That's what left me not remembering my friends from day to day, what made my heart feel like it was exploding in my chest each time one came on, what made me feel like I was trapped with some kind of monster inside my own body. You bet I was anxious and stressed all the time. We found this out halfway through my third grade year. We also found out that they were part of an immune disorder and that they were triggered by allergies. I don't remember anything before treatment. My first memory is waking up in my parents' car after a session and hearing "I am a Rock" and "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel as we drove home through the fog when I was nine. Soon after, the seizures faded to once of twice a month occurrences, and then once or twice a year ones. I went to school every Monday in long sleeve shirts to hide the numbers written on my arms and the welts from the thirty or forty shots I had gotten the Saturday before. I spent every Sunday lying sick in bed, but it was worth it. I had me, and I was just discovering who this me person was.
Meanwhile, the end of my seizures signaled something else. Suddenly, I went from having no friends and an entire student body and teaching staff terrified of me to having an entire student body desperate to prove they weren't afraid of me anymore and a fair chunk of the teaching staff urging them on. While I was playing catch up, they subjected me to daily beatings, social ostracism, mockery, and the kind of sadistic cruelty only a mob can manage. And the teachers did nothing, even when they kicked me in the head and tried to choke me with sand. I had two wonderful friends at school, who did what they could, but they were two against the tide, and I was sometimes more their charity case than their friend (though that changed). I hid in the library, under the eye of the school librarian, one of the few adults who protected me. To stay there, I had to read, and by the end of the year, I had a seventh grade reading level and I was in the advanced class. When I started the year, everybody was talking about how I should have been held back.
I read constantly. Books became my replacement friends, my one strongest connection to the world outside my home. I had to get up and go to school and face everyone because if I didn't, I couldn't go to the library. I made my way through the stack of Garfield comics, then Calvin and Hobbs, then the American Girl books, and the Animorph books, devouring stacks and stacks of anything I could get my hands on, and all this helped me cope with a world full of people, children and teachers, who saw my illness as my own fault, and saw whatever cruelty they could perpetuate on me my just reward. The people inside books were like me. They had problems, and hard, hard lives, and thoughts and feelings. They weren't faceless like the people constantly attacking me.
I changed schools over that summer, and at my new school picked up my first of two stalkers by falling all over the first girl to be nice to me. Turns out she was an obsessive sadist with a need to control. But that year, things were good. I was hungry all the time, because I was growing like a weed for the first time, and had a severely limited diet to keep me from having seizures, but I could think, I had a friend to share secrets with, and I had books. In fourth grade, I developed an obsession with Holocaust novels (yeah). This was so so soooooooo much worse than my life, and people had gotten through. I felt deeply comforted by that. It helped me push on. Later that year, for a week I ate the kinds of foods that would give me seizures, sneaking them under my mom and dad's nose. Sure enough, I got sick, and in a lot of trouble. Meanwhile the addict of the family got kicked out of the house for keeping heroin in the house. When I think "is he using", it's always opiates I think of. I couldn't care less about the weed. Later, I would have to tell on him for stealing my needles and he would be kicked out again, but for the moment, it just seemed like everything was easier when I was seizing all the time. So I made myself seize for a week.
Just after, I discovered YA books. Books with people who had families who drank and used drugs, people who sometimes wanted to die, people who used drugs themselves and could help me figure out what was going on in his head. And I discovered Poe and his tales of familiar feeling madness, and through him, fantasy, with stories of demonic possession, and magical and emotional self destruction. People who were weird and bullied and made to feel ashamed of themselves who would inevitably have magic powers, and would save the day.
By fifth grade, my first friend at the new school had become my stalker, and had started a relentless campaign of manipulation and physical brutality that I still have the scars from to get me back. No one noticed or believed me when I said anything, because she was the good girl, and I was still never to be trusted. I read books about rape victims going through the same thing, the victim blaming, the isolation, the feelings of distrust, and the self doubt. It kept me grounded. It kept me believing that she was doing wrong, and I was blameless.
In seventh grade, I contemplated suicide, over and over and over again, and read dark, horrible books about zombies and demons to bring me out of it. And I wrote. I wrote books that will never see the light of day.
In eighth grade, we moved to a new state, and things got better. Nobody knew about my childhood running around like a maniac during my seizures, or the awkward, at times deeply strange kid who didn't know anything about how other humans acted and was making it up as she went. I made friends. I settled in. I questioned my sexuality in secret, but there weren't any books about girls like me who's blood went hot at boys and girls (there still isn't much. Work must be done) I wrote, read, and started to feel human. Of my two best friends, one later came out as bisexual and as a man. His very religious Catholic (and emotionally abusive, his mother has a nasty habit of threatening suicide when anyone does something she doesn't like) family have not taken this well. Since he's adopted, he has a thing for stories about changelings, orphans, and cuckoos. My other best friend tops me for sheer social awkwardness, had a family that insisted her bipolar disorder wasn't real and she shouldn't take meds even while she did things like try to stick pencils in her ears during wild fits of mania. Her sister's two best friends killed themselves in a suicide pact. Another close friend of mine's dad was killed by his best friend, because he was convinced, wrongly, that the man was sleeping with his wife. Both his children, and the children of the man he killed had to watch. My first girlfriend was a heroin addict. Her brother was a dealer, who thought it would be hilarious to shoot up his eleven-year-old sister just after his thirteen-year-old brother was diagnosed with leukemia. Said brother with cancer and I spent a lot of time together in the isolation classroom we shared, because the school was just too hard on our immune systems. I ended up dropping out and going to college early because the place made me so sick. Anyway, the whole time we were in school together, she battled heroin addiction, and you bet she read tons of YA books about addicts with screwed up families to cope. She also ended up suing several teachers for trying to get her reported as a terrorist because she happened to be Pakistani.
At the same time, my second stalker had started up, a boy who it turned out was the son of big time heroin dealers and had the cops paid off and everybody else frightened (have I mentioned I hate heroin?) and who threatened to rape and kill me. He wasn't a romantic. He hounded me because he enjoyed scaring me, and he came close to killing me once in what was called a prank, and he was never punished. He tried to rape a friend of mine, but her mom came home and caught him. He stole my writing journal, kept it for a year, and gave it back to me with swastikas all over it. He's in prison now for crimes related to his father's business, but just like before, no one would acknowledge a thing he did as wrong, and kept telling me to shut up and be quiet while I was in fear for my life. Meanwhile, one of my best friends committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
This is a small circle of friends in a nice, clean community. Yes, we selected each other for screwed upness, but seriously, this is normal. All of us were normal, and all of us had dark dark lives. And dark YA kept us voracious readers afloat. I didn't even consider it all that bad, because everybody I knew had something awful happening to them, and because it was so much better than it had been when I was a kid. I had friends, and I had books. And reading those books made us all feel normal. Really, the biggest thing about dark YA, is if we hadn't found it, we all might have believed the horrible crushing lie that society keeps trying to feed everyone, that everything is good, and if you have problems, you should be hidden away. You are wrong, you are not normal, and you are alone. Dark books told us we weren't.
We aren't alone.
What follows may be triggering to some of you. I talk about stalking, attempted rape, severe childhood illness, suicide, emotional child abuse, and drug addiction.
I never considered myself to have had a particularly dark adolescence. Maybe it was because my childhood was so awful, or maybe it was because I was surrounded by friends with horrible adolescences in high school, so I was lucky enough to fit right in. Maybe it was because my family was so unbelievably great. I have an addict in my close family. I won't tell you who, in case I ever use my real name on this blog, but I love him dearly, and he has been using since I was a small child. He's currently clean, but we never know how long it will last. To me, even though he is very close to me, this was background noise. It might have left the cops banging on our door trying to find him (small town cops are vindictive) it might have come close to costing my father his job. It might have left me afraid of one of the people I love most dying on the floor of his filthy apartment of an overdose, but it had to be background noise, because I spent every day struggling not to die.
My whole life I had something wrong with me. We didn't know what it was, only that I kept suddenly not being able to speak or recognize my family. Suddenly, I would run, and hit them, and fight when they tried to keep me from running into the street. My heart would race, and my eyes would glaze over, and then, hours later, it would be over, and I would be sobbing helplessly in my mother's arms, unable to remember a thing, except that it must have been horrible. I was sick all the time. I could barely remember my name on good days, and I always had some kind of infection. I was diagnosed with autism, childhood schizophrenia, a host of behavioral problems, and "just being spoiled" by different doctors and psychologists. My teachers favored the latter diagnosis, when they weren't convinced my family was abusing me.
I entered third grade barely able to read words like "cat" and "boy", with no friends, and having two or three several hour long "episodes" (my family called them temper tantrums) a day. My family was still trying to control them with rewards and punishments and keeping me calm. Now, anger and fear tended to bring on the episodes, because severe emotional stress is a common preceding factor for seizures in many seizure disorders. Because that's what I was having. Not fits of rage, not hallucinations, not manifestations of parental abuse, but seizures. That's what left me not remembering my friends from day to day, what made my heart feel like it was exploding in my chest each time one came on, what made me feel like I was trapped with some kind of monster inside my own body. You bet I was anxious and stressed all the time. We found this out halfway through my third grade year. We also found out that they were part of an immune disorder and that they were triggered by allergies. I don't remember anything before treatment. My first memory is waking up in my parents' car after a session and hearing "I am a Rock" and "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel as we drove home through the fog when I was nine. Soon after, the seizures faded to once of twice a month occurrences, and then once or twice a year ones. I went to school every Monday in long sleeve shirts to hide the numbers written on my arms and the welts from the thirty or forty shots I had gotten the Saturday before. I spent every Sunday lying sick in bed, but it was worth it. I had me, and I was just discovering who this me person was.
Meanwhile, the end of my seizures signaled something else. Suddenly, I went from having no friends and an entire student body and teaching staff terrified of me to having an entire student body desperate to prove they weren't afraid of me anymore and a fair chunk of the teaching staff urging them on. While I was playing catch up, they subjected me to daily beatings, social ostracism, mockery, and the kind of sadistic cruelty only a mob can manage. And the teachers did nothing, even when they kicked me in the head and tried to choke me with sand. I had two wonderful friends at school, who did what they could, but they were two against the tide, and I was sometimes more their charity case than their friend (though that changed). I hid in the library, under the eye of the school librarian, one of the few adults who protected me. To stay there, I had to read, and by the end of the year, I had a seventh grade reading level and I was in the advanced class. When I started the year, everybody was talking about how I should have been held back.
I read constantly. Books became my replacement friends, my one strongest connection to the world outside my home. I had to get up and go to school and face everyone because if I didn't, I couldn't go to the library. I made my way through the stack of Garfield comics, then Calvin and Hobbs, then the American Girl books, and the Animorph books, devouring stacks and stacks of anything I could get my hands on, and all this helped me cope with a world full of people, children and teachers, who saw my illness as my own fault, and saw whatever cruelty they could perpetuate on me my just reward. The people inside books were like me. They had problems, and hard, hard lives, and thoughts and feelings. They weren't faceless like the people constantly attacking me.
I changed schools over that summer, and at my new school picked up my first of two stalkers by falling all over the first girl to be nice to me. Turns out she was an obsessive sadist with a need to control. But that year, things were good. I was hungry all the time, because I was growing like a weed for the first time, and had a severely limited diet to keep me from having seizures, but I could think, I had a friend to share secrets with, and I had books. In fourth grade, I developed an obsession with Holocaust novels (yeah). This was so so soooooooo much worse than my life, and people had gotten through. I felt deeply comforted by that. It helped me push on. Later that year, for a week I ate the kinds of foods that would give me seizures, sneaking them under my mom and dad's nose. Sure enough, I got sick, and in a lot of trouble. Meanwhile the addict of the family got kicked out of the house for keeping heroin in the house. When I think "is he using", it's always opiates I think of. I couldn't care less about the weed. Later, I would have to tell on him for stealing my needles and he would be kicked out again, but for the moment, it just seemed like everything was easier when I was seizing all the time. So I made myself seize for a week.
Just after, I discovered YA books. Books with people who had families who drank and used drugs, people who sometimes wanted to die, people who used drugs themselves and could help me figure out what was going on in his head. And I discovered Poe and his tales of familiar feeling madness, and through him, fantasy, with stories of demonic possession, and magical and emotional self destruction. People who were weird and bullied and made to feel ashamed of themselves who would inevitably have magic powers, and would save the day.
By fifth grade, my first friend at the new school had become my stalker, and had started a relentless campaign of manipulation and physical brutality that I still have the scars from to get me back. No one noticed or believed me when I said anything, because she was the good girl, and I was still never to be trusted. I read books about rape victims going through the same thing, the victim blaming, the isolation, the feelings of distrust, and the self doubt. It kept me grounded. It kept me believing that she was doing wrong, and I was blameless.
In seventh grade, I contemplated suicide, over and over and over again, and read dark, horrible books about zombies and demons to bring me out of it. And I wrote. I wrote books that will never see the light of day.
In eighth grade, we moved to a new state, and things got better. Nobody knew about my childhood running around like a maniac during my seizures, or the awkward, at times deeply strange kid who didn't know anything about how other humans acted and was making it up as she went. I made friends. I settled in. I questioned my sexuality in secret, but there weren't any books about girls like me who's blood went hot at boys and girls (there still isn't much. Work must be done) I wrote, read, and started to feel human. Of my two best friends, one later came out as bisexual and as a man. His very religious Catholic (and emotionally abusive, his mother has a nasty habit of threatening suicide when anyone does something she doesn't like) family have not taken this well. Since he's adopted, he has a thing for stories about changelings, orphans, and cuckoos. My other best friend tops me for sheer social awkwardness, had a family that insisted her bipolar disorder wasn't real and she shouldn't take meds even while she did things like try to stick pencils in her ears during wild fits of mania. Her sister's two best friends killed themselves in a suicide pact. Another close friend of mine's dad was killed by his best friend, because he was convinced, wrongly, that the man was sleeping with his wife. Both his children, and the children of the man he killed had to watch. My first girlfriend was a heroin addict. Her brother was a dealer, who thought it would be hilarious to shoot up his eleven-year-old sister just after his thirteen-year-old brother was diagnosed with leukemia. Said brother with cancer and I spent a lot of time together in the isolation classroom we shared, because the school was just too hard on our immune systems. I ended up dropping out and going to college early because the place made me so sick. Anyway, the whole time we were in school together, she battled heroin addiction, and you bet she read tons of YA books about addicts with screwed up families to cope. She also ended up suing several teachers for trying to get her reported as a terrorist because she happened to be Pakistani.
At the same time, my second stalker had started up, a boy who it turned out was the son of big time heroin dealers and had the cops paid off and everybody else frightened (have I mentioned I hate heroin?) and who threatened to rape and kill me. He wasn't a romantic. He hounded me because he enjoyed scaring me, and he came close to killing me once in what was called a prank, and he was never punished. He tried to rape a friend of mine, but her mom came home and caught him. He stole my writing journal, kept it for a year, and gave it back to me with swastikas all over it. He's in prison now for crimes related to his father's business, but just like before, no one would acknowledge a thing he did as wrong, and kept telling me to shut up and be quiet while I was in fear for my life. Meanwhile, one of my best friends committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
This is a small circle of friends in a nice, clean community. Yes, we selected each other for screwed upness, but seriously, this is normal. All of us were normal, and all of us had dark dark lives. And dark YA kept us voracious readers afloat. I didn't even consider it all that bad, because everybody I knew had something awful happening to them, and because it was so much better than it had been when I was a kid. I had friends, and I had books. And reading those books made us all feel normal. Really, the biggest thing about dark YA, is if we hadn't found it, we all might have believed the horrible crushing lie that society keeps trying to feed everyone, that everything is good, and if you have problems, you should be hidden away. You are wrong, you are not normal, and you are alone. Dark books told us we weren't.
We aren't alone.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 01:01 am (UTC)My grandmother, by the way has just discovered YA novels, and has decided they're the best thing ever, ohmyGod, do you have any more???!!!? It's freaking me out. Thankfully she doesn't like vampire romance, because that would be too horrifying to contemplate.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 01:40 am (UTC)A Tree Grows in Brooklyn-attempted rape, child abuse, poverty, alcoholism, parental neglect and murder.
Fahrenheit 451-Censorship, suicide and a breaking down of society.
And let's not forget the classics.
Hans Christian Anderson, whose stories would likely make parents of today cower in terror? Nightmare fuel to the max.
What about Little Women, where a main character does the right thing and dies?
David Copperfield, with horrific child abuse in the first three chapters?
The Prince and the Pauper-Poverty, child abuse, executions?
Children books have never been sanitized.
And your grandma sounds awesome.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 02:45 am (UTC)Keep in mind, this comes after years of saying how I need to stop reading children's books, and fantasy is worthless, so... She is awesome, though.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 03:00 am (UTC)It's hard to write any story above middle grade reader without some sort of darkness.
Okay, here is a good story. Lisa and Kim are best friends. They have happy homes, with loving families, two parents and a sibling each. They are pretty, thin, blond, able bodied wealthy girls who have many friends. They have boyfriends who are entirely respectful and supportive. Their teachers are well trained and their school well funded. They celebrate their birthday together every year. Then they realize they got accepted to different colleges and are sad. But they promise to be friends forever.
I'd prefer to change my niece's diapers. Honestly, that's fantasy and I'd prefer reality.
Don't say you told her so!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 03:20 am (UTC)Even middle grade, I mean A:tLA is for the same age range, and it's a nice happy cartoon about child abuse and genocide. And there's all those books where the dog dies at the end.
I have been courageously restraining myself.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 02:28 pm (UTC)I never have any problem with people friending me, since it's mostly fanfic and book reviews.