Do you have certain things that take you right back to being a teenager?
Maybe it’s that one song on the album that you played over and over, or for certain generations, the smell of anything dewberry from The Body Shop, but we all have something, which sweeps us up into that heady mix of uncertainty and self discovery.
As a writer of young adult fiction, I’m constantly reminded of how different the experience of being a teenager is today, than to when I travelled those choppy waters. For all that I feel like I’ve barely left, technology moves so quickly that really, unless we’re living it, none of us knows what it’s like down in the trenches today.
On the other hand, (and this is what drives me) I think it’s the same, or at least, similar enough, for all of us.
The stories that got me through my teens, weren’t up to date and contemporary. Instead they belonged to young people from a decade or two beforehand, and were probably written by people older than that, and I loved them.
I loved noticing details of things that had moved on, from a brief mention of a sanitary belt, to the gender politics or peer pressures I didn’t feel.
And books get into the messy unpopular parts of life, in a way that their more glamorous counterpart TV, just can’t, because everyone has to be beautiful and coherent in a way that book characters just don’t.
My sister entered her teenage years two years ahead of me, and by the time I was craving ‘teen fiction’, she had amassed a mini library of everything from Judy Blume and SE Hinton to Lois Duncan, ME Kerr, Patricia Windsor, and swathes of unknowns, and I devoured them.
She collected them more by publishing imprint than individual author, so I came to love Lions Teen Tracks, and Pan Horizons, with their geometric primary colours scattered on a white background.
At the moment I am trying to cut down a manuscript I love, which I dearly want to get published, and reading it again after a break, I keep coming up against flashes of these books, in a voyeuristic view of someone’s family from the outside, to a father and daughter running together, and a sarcastic antihero who feels redeemable.
I loved those books, which were not written for me, and I love the full spectrum of Young Adult fiction on sale today, from the timeless and eternal, to those which dare to capture the exact moment in time we’re living, and what it feels like to live and grow with it.
Young people are dealing with emotions that are raw and exposed and vulnerable. Thrown into emotional situations they have to learn how to handle, and constantly balancing what they can and can’t control.
There are a thousand stories to explore.
Mainly I’m comforted by my own belief, that for all the differences, and changes in being a teenager, there will always be something real and universal in the experience, and we are better for remembering that.
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