You Can't Go Home Again: The Fatherhood Young Adult Fiction
The last days of my first year at an MFA writing program were rushing away when one of my professors recommended a YA book for me to read outside of class. Looking for Alaska by John Green. At that point I had read few books that might be considered YA, but I wasn't actively seeking them out. With all do respect to John Green, my initial thought was that his name didn't exactly evoke feelings of an exciting author. I was wrong. Even though all my final assignments were close to due as Christmas drew near, I started reading through Looking for Alaska and hardly put it down for a couple days until I finished the last page. Don't judge a book by its author, right?
While John Green had already published three novels and participated on two other collaborative books, his name was not as widespread at that time. Once I finished up the semester that year, I went ahead and finished reading everything I could by John Green and went on to discover similar authors. I loved it all and was surprised to find such mature content within the YA genre. Alcohol, smoking, and blunt depictions of teenage sexuality.
There was excitement associated with the name John Green after all. Soon after I finished Looking for Alaska, he released The Fault In Our Stars and his popularity cascaded within the reading community. And then it became a movie and he was soaring across pop culture in general.
I realized that there are plenty of adults that read YA fiction; some even exclusively. I considered what it was about YA that I found so intriguing.
It was the theme: you can't go home again.
And that was the exact title of one of the two pieces of American Literature that initially came to mind once I began thinking about where YA evolved from.
In 1940 the Thomas Wolfe novel You Can't Go Home Again was published posthumously. A novel that was thick enough to double as a heavy doorstop. On the other side of wordcount spectrum, the other work that came to mind was Nathanial Hawthorne's short story My Kinsman, Major Molineux, published in 1832. I am not here to analyze or critique these two pieces of work, and by no means are they the only works of literature that have helped pave the way for the now popular YA genre (Huckleberry Finn, etc), but rather acknowledge what these two works mean to me personally as a reader and aspiring writer.
Each has a character that literally leaves home on a journey. As the two characters go further and further away from their comfort zone, they both face individuals and situations that exemplify the potential horrors of the larger world from what they are used to. What they know. Even if they return home to that comfort zone, having been exposed to much more makes them unable to view the world they grew up in the same way. These two characters have lost their innocence and can't ever get it back.
When I think of loss of innocence, I don't believe that people generally lose it overnight, or from one specific event in their lives. It's not necessarily something like losing your virginity, or experiencing the feeling of being intoxicated for the first time, or getting in a fight, or leaving home for college (or elsewhere) that can exclusively make you lose your innocence. Rather, it's a combination of things. Your loss of innocence is not a single experience, but a period of time in your life, and you don't even realize you're losing it until its gone. You just sort of realize one day, where has my innocence gone? as you nostalgically look back after a series of changes in your life.
Everybody loses their innocence at some point or another, and nobody can get it back once its gone. Simple as that. That is why YA fiction is so relatable, even for adults to read. Novels from this genre work so well depicting loss of innocence because the reader can follow the journey of a character and read through the various scenes where the character loses it, and think back on our own lives. You don't have to literally leave home to lose your innocence. Home is more of a metaphor; a state of content with the world you know before being exposed to the more mature variables of life. These variables can still creep into your sense of familiarity without going on some grand journey out into the world. Yet still, while you haven't physically left home, you will never be able to view home the way you grew up knowing it. Physical journey or not, you've reached the point where everything has changed.
To this day, I have a pocket-sized version of Looking for Alaska that I sometimes bring out and about with me just for the comfort of having a book so meaningful to me accessible. It helps me to revisit my own experiences and how I became who I am today. It is because of this novel, this author, and my MFA professor that recommended it (thank you, Phyllis Schalant) that my reading horizons have greatly broadened as I accepted young adult fiction into my adult life.
I enjoy reading anything and everything I can get my hands on. I can go from Stephen King to Margaret Atwood, with something like a Drew Brees biography mixed in. Yet, after reading John Green I began discovering all sorts of other contemporary YA writers that have written absolutely wonderful compelling books; Jeff Zenter, Tim Tharp, Morgan Matson, Jay Asher, Jesse Andrews, Shaun David Hutchinson, Peter Lerangis, Maureen Johnson, Robyn Schneider, Abigail Tarttelin, Tommy Wallach, among others. Many others. I am proud to include such authors in my library today.