A Light in Darkness

About two years before my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he had a sudden spike in what I'm convinced was a long-term, low-grade depression. He threatened to commit suicide and then spent some time in an inpatient mental hospital. One of the "prescriptions" his doctors gave him: stop reading so many dark books.

He followed this prescription; he put away the Steven King novels and whatever else that could be considered "dark." He started reading the scriptures more. Becky and I gave him the omnibus edition of The Lord of the Rings, and he read that, too. (It is, I believe, one of the last books he read and understood.)

That memory has resurfaced for me as I've read and thought about this article from the Wall Street Journal about the darkness in much of today's young adult literature. It argues that publishers let too much violence and swearing into the teen novels they publish, and that this darkness will help create teenagers who are troubled or depraved. And while I confess that there are a lot of "dark" teen novels published, I can say without doubt that they are not the only kind. There are plenty of lighter and/or brighter books published, despite the failure of the Amy in the article (who left her local Barnes and Noble defeated and empty-handed). As with all things, finding the right book requires effort, talking to others, reading reviews, and spending some time reading jacket copy. Still, the article insists that teen novels are dark, and that said darkness is "a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is."

There is much of me that rejects this argument. It is the same sunny-side-up logic that calls for the repeal of Planned Parenthood funding, the sort that believes that if we eliminate the darker options, people will therefore start to choose the sunnier parts. Happy, well-adjusted teens, the argument seems to go, will simply happen if we limit their reading to the cheery and uplifting. But adolescence, while admittedly full of its own pleasures, isn't always the sunniest place to be. Books about darkness don't create darkness. Darkness comes from the lives those adolescents have lived. Choices like drinking, doing drugs, becoming anorexic or bulimic, or cutting (which seems to be the topic that raises the most hackles) don't happen out of nowhere. They happen because teenagers are always on the brink of something, caught in the edgiest and intense part of becoming adults, and when you toss in some sort of trauma, darkness happens.

Of course, my own adolescent darkness also gives texture to my perspective. I can't answer the "do dark books create darkness?" question without thinking of my own dark self struggling through ages 15-18. I didn't constrain myself to just one genre as a teenager. My tastes ranged from V. C. Andrews to L. M. Montgomery. I read a lot of Danielle Steel and all of Harry Harrison's West of Eden trilogy. My favorite novel was Little Women(I know! Paint that picture for yourself: white-blonde girl dressed in black clothes, black suede fringed jacket and silver-toed combat boots immersed in Jo's adventures), but I'd plunge myself into the world of nearly any book—so long as it took me out of my own reality. Reading had always been intensely pleasurable for me, but at that time in my life it was also an intense escape, a brief salve before I stepped back into my ache. The difficult, gory, supernatural, or foreboding things I read about still brought me escape because even though the novels presented things of a dark color, the hue was different from mine.

I do wonder: if I'd immersed myself in happy-happy-joy-joy sorts of books (examples of which I cannot proffer), would they have made it easier for me to deal with my troubles? I cannot say either way, because it didn't happen. Did reading about bad, violent things happening to other people make my own bad violences worse? Perhaps. Maybe, like my dad, my depression was exacerbated by some of what I read. Or dark books made it easier to step into darkness, because it was familiar. Perhaps the books cast a certain glamour upon the darkness. Or, perhaps the opposite: they made me feel normal because they helped me know that I wasn't the only unhappy person in the world. Or maybe all of those things were true. Maybe the solution to my problems—as with all of adolescent angst—was multifarious. Books, as well as life, shoved me into darkness, but life—including books—eventually taught me how to deal.

The writer of the WSJ article places, I believe, too much importance on books themselves. That sentence seems very nearly sacrilegious for a person like me—libriarian, bibliophile, logophile, aspiring writer, obsessive reader who always has a book in her purse. With my very soul I know that books can evoke change in readers, both for good and bad, but I also know they are not the only force in a reader's life. External experiences, the real stuff those teenagers are living through, evoke much more change. And you can be sure that the violence, swearing, drinking, drugging, and cutting they are reading about they didn't discover in a novel. They discovered it in their lives, through their experiences.

The article also doesn't allow for personal reading preference. Whatever the cause, I am just never going to be the reader that's satisfied by fluffy novels.  I'm just not. Reading happy-happy-joy-joy novels with improbably happy endings feels like a waste of my time. I continue to be drawn to the dark side in the sense that I like reality in the novels I read. I don't like novels that end with an undeserved fairy tale. I like my characters to suffer and learn and become better because that is also how I live. One of my librarian friends just today nailed my reading preferences as she made a suggestion for a book she thought I'd like. "If I finish a book and I loved it but can't exactly explain why, then I know it's a book you'll love," she said. "If I finish it and I'm sort of sad, I know it will make you happy." I laughed and agreed and we shared the "there's a book for every reader" that's become my librarian mantra. Some teens are drawn to dark reads because that is just the kind of book they like to read.

More than anything, what the WSJ article fails to observe is that books, like any media, require parental involvement. Not in the sense of "gatekeeping" or "those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read." I'm not going to rely on publishers to not publish books that might be problematic to my opinion for what is appropriate for my kids to read. Instead, I am going to rely on myself, and I do this by actually reading the same books my children read. Or at the very least, thumbing through, reading bits and pieces, or reading about the books on the numerous book review sites available. But I don't stop there: I also try to talk to my kids about what they read. I've been known to spout off long emails about the virtuous (or non-) actions of a certain character and what I think about them. I talk about why Bella and Edward are complete idiots and why the ending to Mockingjay wasn't as bad as everyone things it is. I've even taught my kids to spot typos and grammatical errors in the books they read; they bring them to me so we can chuckle over them. We talk about what is good writing and what isn't; they know it is OK to put down a book if they don't like it or if its issues are too intense for them. They've even stopped reading books because there was too much swearing for their comfort. This comes not because I am a stellar example (trust me, they've heard me swear before), but because of that one simple act: we talk about books. I use books for one of the exact reasons they exist: to teach. Yes, even novels teach something and I think it's our job as parents to use them as teaching opportunities, not to ban them or make them forbidden.

Despite the admonition to "guide what young people read," what I want more is to teach my young people how to think. In that way, books—be they dark or sunny—as well as movies, music, and even, yes, the dreaded and much-despised (by me) video games can help move their intelligence forward. Of course, I don't always get things right. I don't read everything my kids read. But I do pay attention to what they are reading, just as I do with what movies they go to or what songs I buy for them. Instead of pretending that darkness doesn't exist, I am trying to give them at least one light to hold up against it.

Comments

[Claudia McDaniel]

I love this. Love.
Too often people want a scapegoat and perhaps it's easy to blame books. Parents need to be more vigilant about what what influences their children but definitely not censor those influences by banning all the "bad" things. I agree that we need to teach our children to think for themselves and to make good decisions. Books really do give us tools to do that. They are good springboards for discussions about what is going on in our lives. Being a teenager isn't easy but I agree that kids don't learn about the bad stuff just from the books they read. They already know about these things and then a book may have those same elements as part of a story. Books don't precede real life events, they certainly come after.
I think I'm a pretty optimistic person, but I like to read dark stuff, too. It is an escape. It's a peek into another world. It's a way to learn from others' triumphs and failures. Ultimately, we make our own decisions. The only time I can think of that a book told me what to do was when I read a cookbook. ;)

[Margot/NZ]

Amy - I'm helping our library to implement a blog (it's in its infancy, just a draft for now, while we practice). One of our categories is 'links' and I'd very much like to highlight this blog post when it's my 'turn' to post a link.
Is that OK with you? Although the librarians are currently the only ones who are reading our draft blog, your message is as important for us to read as for parents of teens. (And when we move to the 'real' blog, I hope your link will come with us).
OK?

[Britt]

I think there is a level of darkness that is safe and a level or darkness that is unsafe. I think there is so much that a juvenile can learn from certain "dark "topics. I loved the end of Mockingjay and would be just fine with letting my children read it when they're older. Same with Harry Potter which is quite dark. But the level of darkness I DON'T like is the type that was in the last Batman movie (you know, pre-Heath-Ledger-death) where there is a character who is psychotic and does violent things to amuse himself (Joker) and it is presented in a way that is supposed to be "funny" to the audience. I was sick after I sat through that movie in the theater and listened to people laughing at the violence. That's not okay to me.

Please forgive me for using a movie example instead of a book example. I don't read a lot of books that cross my own standard of morality, so I don't really have any book examples to use.

[Becky K]

So, there is a story about this article and all the buzz from it on NPR today. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/14/137174977/the-dangers-values-of-dark-teen-lit?ft=1&f=1032&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

I loved your post on this issue. It said everything just right, and makes so many, many valid points, the biggest being that we have to be involved in what our kids are reading.

[Maureen]

I think that teenagers are often in dark places, and if they read dark things they don't feel so alone or strange, and when they follow characters out of darkness, then they too can have hope of coming out the other side.

On the other hand, I think a person who has Alzheimers, and no longer has total command of his memory can be affected very differently by dark books. There the lines of reality and fantasy can become blurred and the books are more likely to affect mood.

Finally if you arm teenagers with the information of how you get pregnant and birth control failure rates, and STDs then they can better understand the risks & consequences, make informed choices and reduce the need for Planned Parenthood.

[Helena]

Somebody posted the "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood" article on Two Peas just recently. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. Depends on the kid, and how the topic is handled, I guess.