The Curious Problem of Adults Writing Adolescence for Adults
There is a peculiar transformation taking place in Young Adult fiction. It is not merely that the subjects have become darker, the violence more explicit, or the sexual content more mature. Literature written for adolescents has dealt with death, sexuality, cruelty, prejudice, war, abuse, and every other unpleasant aspect of human existence for generations.
Something more fundamental is happening.
Young Adult may no longer adequately describe an audience at all. Increasingly, it appears to describe a genre about the young adult experience, written largely by adults and consumed substantially by adults.
That is a profoundly different thing from literature written for young adults.
Once that distinction disappears, so does one of the natural constraints upon the category. The question is no longer simply what an adolescent reader is intellectually and emotionally prepared to encounter. The book must also satisfy an adult reader who already possesses decades of additional experience, knowledge, sexual understanding, emotional vocabulary, and social context. Material that would once have placed a novel comfortably within adult fiction can therefore enter YA because the commercial audience consuming it is no longer exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, young.
The result is not merely the introduction of mature subjects. It is the introduction of adult ways of understanding those subjects. A young character may be given knowledge he has not had the experience to acquire, emotional interpretations he has not yet developed, and conceptual frameworks originating in adult intellectual and social discourse. Material can consequently be perfectly appropriate for the adult reader purchasing a YA novel while being intellectually or emotionally inappropriate for the adolescent population the classification ostensibly describes.
This creates an extraordinary inversion. Instead of adults writing literature appropriate to the developmental perspective of young adults, adults can find themselves writing an adult conception of the young adult experience for other adults, while the books retain a classification that implies they are intended for adolescents.
We are gradually replacing literature written for young adults with literature written by adults, increasingly purchased by adults, populated by adolescent characters who think, speak, interpret experience, and understand themselves in distinctly adult ways.
The distinction matters.
In 2012, Bowker Market Research found that 55 percent of purchasers of books classified as Young Adult were adults. More remarkably, 78 percent of those adults reported that they were purchasing the books for themselves rather than for a child. Thus, even more than a decade ago, a substantial portion of the commercial market for Young Adult literature consisted of adults reading books ostensibly written for adolescents.
Since then, the YA market has grown dramatically. Circana reported that American YA print sales in 2023 were approximately 56 percent higher than they had been in 2019.
This creates an obvious commercial pressure that deserves considerably more attention than it receives. If adults constitute an enormous portion of the people purchasing Young Adult fiction, publishers have every incentive to publish Young Adult fiction that adults enjoy reading.
The result may be the gradual destruction of the category itself.
The Problem of Retrospective Adolescence
Every adult was once an adolescent. This creates the illusion that adults possess an unusual qualification for writing adolescence: I know what it is like because I was fifteen once.
But that proposition contains a serious problem.
I have written about a version of this problem before. In The Clarity Paradox: Why Smart People Can’t Sell Their Products, I examined a deceptively simple limitation of human thought: once you know something, you cannot unknow it. Expertise changes the way we perceive information. The expert can attempt to imagine ignorance, but he cannot actually return to the mental state that preceded his knowledge.
The same paradox applies to adulthood.
The adult remembers being fifteen while possessing everything she has learned since she was fifteen.
She cannot unknow it.
The forty-five-year-old author may remember his first sexual experience, his first encounter with death, his first serious betrayal, or his first realization that his parents were fallible human beings. What he cannot completely recover is the consciousness that experienced those events without knowing what came afterward.
Memory is not archival footage. It is reconstruction.
The adult possesses concepts for experiences that the adolescent may only possess as feelings. He understands motivations that were once mysterious to him. He recognizes manipulation that he once mistook for affection. He understands sexuality through experiences unavailable to his younger self. He has acquired political, psychological, sociological, and moral vocabularies through which he can categorize events that his adolescent self simply experienced.
The danger appears when the author gives all of that retrospective understanding back to the adolescent character.
The character remains sixteen biologically while becoming thirty-six cognitively.
That is not necessarily sophisticated Young Adult fiction. It may simply be adult fiction wearing an adolescent costume.
Adolescents Are Not Incomplete Adults
There is an unfortunate tendency to discuss young people as though the only difference between a fifteen-year-old and a thirty-five-year-old is accumulated information.
It is not.
Adolescence is a distinct developmental period. Executive function, impulse control, risk evaluation, emotional regulation, social cognition, identity formation, and the ability to integrate complex experiences continue developing through adolescence and into early adulthood. Individual development varies enormously, of course, and no neurological milestone suddenly transforms a child into an adult on a particular birthday.
Nevertheless, development is real.
That reality is precisely what makes adolescence so interesting in fiction.
A teenager encountering an adult problem does not necessarily produce an adult response. That difference is where much of the drama of adolescence resides.
The first betrayal matters partly because the adolescent has not endured twenty betrayals.
The first great love matters because there is no previous great love against which to measure it.
The first confrontation with mortality occurs without decades of experience with death.
The first serious moral compromise occurs before a lifetime of compromises has taught the character how easily human beings rationalize their behavior.
Remove that limitation and we do not make the adolescent character more sophisticated. We remove something essential about adolescence.
Ignorance, innocence, impulsiveness, certainty, confusion, embarrassment, discovery, misplaced confidence, emotional extremity, and the inability to recognize the significance of an experience while it is occurring are not defects that an author must correct.
They are part of the territory.
Mature Subjects Are Not the Same as Mature Consciousness
This distinction is particularly important because criticism of contemporary YA can easily deteriorate into an argument over forbidden subjects.
That misses the point.
A Young Adult novel can deal with murder without becoming an adult novel. It can deal with sex, addiction, suicide, abuse, war, racism, poverty, religious conflict, or political violence.
The important question is not merely what happens to the adolescent character.
It is how the adolescent character is capable of understanding what happens.
A sixteen-year-old may experience sexual desire. That does not mean he possesses the sexual psychology of a forty-year-old.
A teenager may experience political injustice. That does not mean she possesses the conceptual vocabulary of a graduate seminar with which to interpret it.
An adolescent may encounter death. That does not mean he processes mortality with the accumulated grief of someone who has buried parents, friends, spouses, and perhaps children.
When adult authors erase these distinctions, they create something paradoxical. The characters become less realistic precisely as the books become supposedly more “mature.”
The teenager becomes a fantasy.
There is, however, a serious argument on the other side that should not simply be dismissed. Young people really do encounter abuse, addiction, sexuality, prejudice, violence, mental illness, family collapse, and death. A novel dealing honestly with such an experience may provide a frightened or isolated young reader with recognition, comfort, language, or even a means of understanding what is happening to him. Literature has always possessed this power.
But representation and interpretation are not the same thing.
The risk lies in presenting an adult interpretation of an adolescent experience as though the interpretation arose naturally from adolescence itself. The author does not merely depict the difficult experience. He supplies the young character with the adult framework through which that experience is to be understood.
That framework may reflect contemporary psychology, politics, sexuality, sociology, or prevailing theories about identity and human relationships. Some of those frameworks may prove durable and valuable. Others may eventually be regarded as artifacts of a particular decade, social movement, academic fashion, or passing phase in the way adults believed these questions should be understood.
The adolescent reader is therefore not merely encountering a difficult subject. He may also be receiving an adult social construct for interpreting it, presented through a fictional contemporary who appears to have arrived at that understanding naturally.
Those are very different things.
Who Is the Book Actually For?
The enormous adult market for YA introduces another complication.
If the teenager in a Young Adult novel behaves too much like an actual teenager, adult readers may find him irritating.
Real adolescents can be impulsive. They can be astonishingly certain about things they barely understand. They misunderstand adults. They misunderstand one another. They frequently misunderstand themselves.
That is developmentally unsurprising.
It can also be frustrating to a forty-year-old reader.
There is therefore a subtle commercial incentive to create adolescent protagonists whom adults find unusually comfortable to inhabit: teenagers with adult introspection, adult emotional articulation, adult sexual awareness, adult social analysis, and adult moral reasoning.
Such characters can still attend high school. They can still worry about their parents. They can still be described as seventeen.
But age has become scenery.
We should then ask an uncomfortable question: Is this book actually intended for the seventeen-year-old represented on the page, or for the thirty-seven-year-old purchasing it?
If the latter increasingly determines what succeeds in the YA market, then adult readership is not merely expanding the audience for Young Adult literature. It may be changing what Young Adult literature is.
The Authenticity Paradox
Contemporary publishing has spent considerable time debating authenticity and the limits of an author’s ability to represent experiences outside his own. The Own Voices movement made this question particularly explicit: how accurately can an author represent an experience that is not his?
Whatever one thinks of the answers offered by that movement, the philosophical question beneath it is legitimate.
If I write a novel about life as a Navajo, I can research Navajo history, interview Navajo people, study the culture, visit the Navajo Nation, read its literature, and approach the subject with considerable care. I may produce a well-researched and sympathetic novel.
But I cannot acquire the experience of having grown up Navajo.
My danger is not necessarily hostility, prejudice, or even factual error. It is something subtler. I may create a convincing representation of what I imagine it is like to be Navajo, and readers unfamiliar with that experience may mistake my reconstruction for the experience itself.
Curiously, age is rarely subjected to the same scrutiny.
The problem is unusual because age differs from most human characteristics. Every adult writer possesses genuine experience of childhood and adolescence, yet that experience is permanently inaccessible in its original form.
The adult is simultaneously an insider and an outsider.
He remembers being sixteen.
But the Clarity Paradox applies again. He cannot unknow everything he has learned since sixteen. He cannot restore ignorance simply because he remembers possessing it.
This creates an intriguing contradiction in contemporary publishing. We may be extremely concerned about an author imposing an outsider’s understanding upon a character from a different cultural experience while simultaneously encouraging adults to construct adolescent characters using knowledge, categories, experiences, and social frameworks those characters could not yet possess.
The resulting representation can create precisely the problem that authenticity arguments warn against: a false impression of what it is like to be someone else.
This does not mean adults should not write adolescent characters. Taken literally, such a rule would make most children’s literature impossible.
It means something much more demanding.
Writing adolescents authentically requires recognizing the limits of adult hindsight rather than treating adulthood as adolescence plus additional information.
The writer must sometimes know something that the character cannot know and resist giving it to him.
He must also recognize that the framework through which he currently understands an experience is not necessarily the framework through which his adolescent character would understand it, nor necessarily the framework a young reader needs imposed upon the experience before he has had the opportunity to understand it himself.
That is considerably harder than merely writing a younger version of oneself.
The Disappearance of YA
There is an irony in all of this.
The more publishers attempt to make YA “mature,” the less reason there is for YA to exist as a separate literary category.
If the characters possess adult consciousness, encounter adult situations, process those situations through adult conceptual frameworks, engage in relationships written primarily to satisfy adult readers, and are marketed to a readership substantially composed of adults, then what remains uniquely Young Adult?
The protagonist’s birth certificate?
That cannot sustain a literary category.
The great value of Young Adult literature should be precisely the thing contemporary publishing sometimes appears embarrassed by: its youth.
A genuinely adolescent perspective is not an inferior adult perspective.
It is a different perspective.
There are things adolescents do not yet know. There are experiences they have not yet accumulated. There are connections they cannot yet make. There are emotions for which they do not yet possess adequate language. There are dangers they underestimate and trivialities they catastrophize. There are adults they trust who should not be trusted and adults they distrust whom they will later discover were right.
That incomplete understanding is not something a writer should rush to repair.
It is the story.
If we systematically replace it with adult hindsight, we do something stranger than exposing young readers to mature themes. We teach them a fictional version of adolescence created by adults for the consumption of other adults.
Worse, we risk presenting the adult author’s current interpretation of difficult human experiences as though it were the natural understanding of the adolescent himself. The young reader is no longer simply being shown a difficult world. He is being handed an adult map of that world and being told, through characters ostensibly like himself, that this is how someone his age already understands it.
Eventually, Young Adult ceases to identify the reader.
It ceases even to identify a developmental perspective.
It becomes adult genre fiction in which the characters happen to be young.
And when that happens, we have not made Young Adult literature more mature.
We have eliminated Young Adult literature altogether.
