Last week, the book publisher Lisa Lucas started a conversation on Twitter
about all of the potentially disturbing, sometimes naughty books that
some kids of our vintage used to read without our parents paying the
least bit of attention. “Flowers in the Attic,” a creepy, gothic tale of
incest and child abuse by V.C. Andrews was a popular one, and I
remember it getting passed around one summer at sleep away camp when I
was 11. It scared the daylights out of me.
I
was a voracious reader, and some of what I read in my tweens and teens
was prurient and had close to zero literary value. (For instance, “Go Ask Alice,”
a cautionary tale of drug use masquerading as a teen’s diary, which I
thought was a true story until I was 30.) Other books provided tools for
identity formation, in ways that in retrospect are hilarious and
myopic. Like many dramatic, bookish teenagers, I loved “The Bell Jar,”
which I’m pretty sure was on my sophomore English summer reading list.
After
that, I read biographies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on my own,
because I love mess and gossip. In college, I told at least one suitor
that I wanted a passionate romance like theirs:
The first time they met, at a party, Hughes ripped off Plath’s headband
and earring, and Plath bit Hughes on the face. In true adolescent
fashion, I glossed over the depressing ending of their story. I doubt
that was the takeaway my teachers intended when “The Bell Jar” was
assigned.
I mention all this because
of the recent ongoing public debate, mostly among adults, about which
books are “appropriate” for teenagers to read in schools. Book bans, even book burnings, are on the rise, and the latest round of discussion took off with the McMinn County, Tenn., school board’s decision to remove “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, from their district’s eighth grade curriculum.
For
the record, I think bans are terrible for many reasons, including
because they’re frequently about political fights among adults that
spill into children’s lives when it’s not really about them. As my Times
colleague Margaret Renkl
wrote Monday in an Opinion essay, “the vast majority of teenagers in
McMinn County already carry the modern world around in their pockets —
the cussing and the sex and the violence and all of it.” Many recent
bans are part of the general, misguided push against so-called critical
race theory. Other bans are against books depicting any kind of
non-heterosexual sex or romance. The American Library Association has a
list of the top 10 most challenged books from 2001-2020 on its website, and sexual and racial content are popular recent reasons for banning.
More alarming are the threats to criminalize distribution of what politicians deem “pornographic” books. One Texas high school librarian told NBC News
she was retiring earlier than planned because of these threats. “I got
out because I was afraid to stand up to the attacks. I didn’t want to
get caught in somebody’s snare. Who wants to be called a pornographer?
Who wants to be accused of being a pedophile or reported to the police
for putting a book in a kid’s hand?”
While it is distressing, none of this is new. An article published more than 40 years ago
in Time magazine called “The Growing Battle of the Books” discusses a
strikingly similar dynamic to the one we’re witnessing today, with books
that have sexual, racial and religious content among the most banned.
The entire article is worth a read, but this paragraph stuck out to me as particularly relevant to our current struggle:
Few
censors, if any, tend to see that censorship itself runs counter to
certain basic American values. But why have so many people with such an
outlook begun lurching forth so aggressively in recent years? They quite
likely have always suffered the censorial impulse. But they have been
recently emboldened by the same resurgent moralistic mood that has
enspirited evangelical fundamentalists and given form to the
increasingly outspoken constituency of the Moral Majority. At another
level, they probably hunger for some power over something, just as
everybody supposedly does these days. Thus they are moved, as American
Library Association President Peggy Sullivan says, “by a desperation to
feel some control over what is close to their lives.”
It’s
not surprising to me that after two years of pandemic uncertainty and
chaos, we’re in a moment where some parents want to exert control over
something, anything for their
kids, and I do have some empathy for that feeling, if not for the
expression of it. Particularly because the early quarantines, when
virtual schooling was happening everywhere, brought curriculum and
teachers into our homes in much more intimate ways. In that moment,
teenagers were at home instead of starting to grow away from their
families, which is what they’re supposed to do. While parents always
have some sway over their kids, this period of enforced togetherness
possibly gave some parents the illusion that they still had full
authority over their adolescents’ intellectual lives.
My
mother, who practiced psychiatry for 40 years, used to tell me that you
have until your kid is 12 to, if you will, brainwash them with your set
of moral values. After that, their peers become as, if not more,
influential than their parents. In the ’90s, Judith Rich Harris, an
independent researcher, promoted the theory that parental influence matters less than we think in terms of child development.
Harris, who died in 2019,
once wrote, “If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn’t be
shoplifting nail polish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses to
spray I LOVE YOU LIƨA on the arch,” and that “If they really aspired to
‘mature status’ they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the
laundry and figuring out their income taxes. Teenagers aren’t trying to
be like adults: they are trying to distinguish themselves from adults!”
And thank goodness they are. In December, NPR ran a segment
on book bans, and noted that in North Kansas City, Mo., a parent-led
group got “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson and “Fun Home” by
Alison Bechdel, which are both memoirs by gay writers, removed from
school libraries. “The district ended up putting those books back on
shelves after students protested. Sixteen-year-old Aurora Nicol spoke at
a school board meeting after the books were returned,” Nomin Ujiyediin
reported.
Despite parental outbursts,
teens are going to continue to find ways to assert themselves publicly
and privately, and to get their mitts on whatever their parents don’t
want them to read, see or discuss.
I'm
so glad I read so many different kinds of books as a teenager, even the
supposedly bad ones. Because it was fun, because I bonded with my
friends over those books, because they gave me goofy ideas I could
explore in my head without acting them out in real life; and some ideas
that I had to act out in real life to experience the consequences of my
choices. My older daughter is currently reading a book about sinister
dolls who are constantly plotting against each other and attempting to
avoid something called “permanent doll state.” I have no idea if she’s
learning a damn thing from it, but she sure is enjoying herself.
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