"That that is just the person that you are."

There are moments, usually quiet moments in the dead of night, when the world shifts. I found myself relaxed, calm, anxious for my phone to buzz with the continuation of the nightly conversation that I look so forward to.

I sat and heard her start to tell me a story. I wasn't all there, my mind drifting off to Chicago while maintaining some semblance of concentration.

What she said broke my reverie and brought me swiftly back to my body, sitting on the steps staring across the darkened street.

No, what?

And there it was.

The reasoning, his version of the truth, conveyed to me via her. The nerve of this slimy coward. To later tell a mutual friend that it wasn't his fight to fight, yet to have never even told me about it.

It.

Allegedly.

Apparently, it - that alleged indiscretion - happened on the fourth of July. Happened when I, the sober driver, was saying goodbye. Well here's a sweet goodbye for you...

It was an anger I have not felt in some time. My jaw clenched, my eyes narrowed, I was, in that moment, comprised solely of steel and tingling fingertips.

Untruths!

Annoyance filled my steel-skeleton, and I drove home in a concentrated rage. I grabbed my phone and sent a message - abrupt, rude, sharply displaying my acute disapproval.

I did not expect a response, but when I saw it, my anger flared past steel. I am molten iron now, white hot.

I still am. It's been some hours now, edging toward twenty four, yet I cannot break the script from my mind.

"...everyone conceded that that is just the person that you are."

What am I?

I have lists of occasions I could reference, all to refute this claim that "that that is just the person that" I am.

But they fall far short of the damage I wish to inflict.

Self-control serves me well, but in all honesty, I am so hurt by this assertion, this accusation, the untruth of it all, that if we come face to face, I won't hesitate to show him just what kind of person I am.

The Economist...

Work and parenting

Motherly love

Jul 26th 2011, 10:20 by S.D. | LONDON

A WORKING mother knows that balancing the demands of private home and high-rise office is not her only worry. While busy, breadwinning fathers are unlikely to provoke moral panic, the public’s interest in how working women raise their children is easily piqued. One of Britain’s biggest-selling newspapers proclaimed fearfully on Friday: "Three in four middle-class mothers continue to work after having a baby, a study shows... The figures point to a relentless rise in the number of working mothers of very young children."

ever, to dislodge the stigma that attaches to single parents.

Contrary to these veiled aspersions, the study in question should reassure career-minded mothers. Conducted by researchers at University College London, it surveyed 19,000 British households to determine how parental employment affects a child’s behaviour throughout the first five years of life.

The results will startle those who think that children benefit from having a stay-at-home mum. In fact, the paper indicates that maternal employment can often improve the chances of having well-adjusted kids.

For example, five-year-olds whose mothers had been at home when they were babies were more likely to have behavioural problems than other children. For each child, the longer the time their mother was off work, the more bratty was the child's behaviour. Housebound women were also far more likely to report symptoms of depression than their working counterparts, problems which can only make the process of childrearing more difficult.

Of course, life can rarely be boiled down to simple equations of cause and effect. What complicates this picture is the correlation between work patterns and other factors like lower household income, poorer education and depression, which might affect whether a woman chooses to go to work. Interestingly, when the study adjusted for these factors, the relationship between bad behaviour and maternal unemployment remained strong for girls but not for boys. This may reflect, the authors said, “the importance of gender in family role model processes”—the inference being that girls benefit from having a mother as an exemplar of a woman who is successful and independent, while the effect is less pronounced for boys.

The paper also looked at the working arrangements of all adults in the household—a sensible method, and a point of distinction with other studies that focused exclusively on what mothers do with their time. Once again, the trends differed by sex. Boys, but not girls, were likely to suffer from their mother being the sole breadwinner, although once the results were adjusted for income, education and depression, the detrimental impact on boys disappeared. Boys thrived equally in homes where both parents were working, and in two-parent "traditional" families in which their mothers stayed at home. Girls, in contrast, appeared to have significantly fewer problems where both parents were employed than in traditional homes.

For social progressives, the results are mixed. Working women can head to their desks knowing that they are doing their daughters a service, and that they are not doing their sons any harm. Yet the study also suggests (the admittedly widely-accepted proposition) that the children of single mothers are more likely to be troublesome, and that the best arrangement for both boys and girls is to live in a two-parent household in which both adults are employed. These results provide a robust defence of why women should be supported in returning to work after childbirth; they make it harder, how

The study has other limitations, too. It restricted its analysis to white children because of problems with sampling other ethnicities. Statistically, that is not a huge drawback: 92% of Britons identified themselves as white in the 2001 census. A bigger issue is the way the data were collected, involving questionnaires about children’s behaviour, almost always answered by mothers. Working mums know that they are vulnerable to criticism from certain sections of society and the media; when surveyed, this might incline them to paint defensively rosy portraits of their children, and so to skew the results.

Race and Stuff...

I've been meaning to blog about racism for awhile now, but I found this article today, and until I get around to finally actually blogging about it, I think this will do:

Vintage Racism: The "We Don't Want Trouble" Defense Makes a Comeback

NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ

Back in the Jim Crow days, there were two basic approaches to racism in the segregated South. You were an aggressor—a lawmaker wedded to segregation, a member of a lynch mob, a scientist trying to prove non-white people were inferior, or your garden variety white person who might use a racial epithet. Or you were a bystander—someone who maintained the status quo by saying, "We don't want any trouble."

Nowadays, being racist in public is less acceptable, so people come up with all kinds of excuses for prejudice. Like, "Just kidding!" Or, "I'm not racist, I'm just honest. (Variation: I'm just exercising my First Amendment Rights.)" "I have black friends." "Posting on Facebook can't be racist." And so on. Even amid claims that America is now post-racial, one of the tried-and-true ways to be racist has endured: the argument that fighting against bigotry is more trouble than it's worth.

Take, for instance, what happened recently at an Arkansas graduation: A black teen mom named Kymberly Wimberly was the top student at McGehee Secondary School in Little Rock. Despite these accomplishments, a white co-valedictorian was named along with her. Was it because this white student had the same GPA? Nope, it was because school officials worried that making Wimberly valedictorian would result in a "big mess" at the majority-white school.

This response may seem antiquated, but it's not uncommon—and neither is the old-school racism it defends. When Prescott, Arizona, residents shouted racial epiphets at non-white students while they were painting a school mural, the administration's first thought wasn't to speak out against racism. It was to lighten the skin of the Hispanic boy depicted on the mural. Why? They wanted to avoid "a controversy."

As late as last year, schools in states like Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama have held segregated proms for black and white (and sometimes Hispanic) students. Overt racism still exists—one parent in Charleston, Mississippi reportedly said in 2008, "I'm not going to have any of those niggers rubbing up against my daughter"—but others prefer these divided dances because they want to side-step "racial flareups, a fight."

In this case, fear of violence is code for fear of change. And that's not much different from the Jim Crow era. A student named Chasidy Buckley, ensnared in the Mississippi prom fight, didn't mince words when she described what was at the heart of the segregation: "The [school] said, 'why change now? Let's just keep going.' That's the whole thing with our town. Everybody's afraid of change. It's just horrible."

I'm embarrassed for America.

We have so much hate. It's not just directed at Blacks, or Latinos, or Asians. It's directed at everyone - gays, lesbians, women, minorities. (I apologize for any missteps in capitalization - I'm not hip to the politically correct shit these days.)

I remember my high school English teacher Mr. H drawing boxes on the whiteboard and explaining that people need to think in categories.

I'll give him that.

I personally put myself in many boxes, all at once. The two that stand out are White and Woman. I was so excited to receive a book I ordered just before I went to Chicago about the modern definition of feminism written by two girls about my age.

The one thing that struck me as I was reading the book was how many women said that they never really explored feminism proper because they thought it was for white women. The term "feminism" was too academic, too Ivory Tower, too haughty for the regular woman's vernacular. And so they avoided it. It didn't mean that they weren't living it, engaging in it, defining it for themselves. It just meant they weren't calling it that.

But they had a hard time seeing themselves as both Black (or Latina, or whatever they were) and as a woman. It was like they didn't think it was possible to be two things at once. (It's hard, especially when one or more of the boxes you've put yourself in - or are put in - are minorities.)

I'll give Americans the opportunity to think in categories. Race, gender, economic standing - those things are all categories. You're free to make observations. But you're forgetting to observe other important stuff to.

Instead of: "Hey I bet that Black kid is going to steal that lady's purse. Look at his baggy pants; the kids these days." It should be: "How nice of that young man to help that lady across the street. Look as his baggy pants; the kids these days." (You're still an ageist ass, but better that than a racist, right? I'm just kidding, I've got an ageism rant you're probably dying to hear. - I just made myself laugh.)

But we've failed at educating people how to stop it all at observation. Instead, we've let our categorical thinking invade our lifestyles, our habits, our daily lives.

We categorize, we lump people together, we judge.

We don't embrace all of our categories, our weirdness, our faults. We push them away and instead pick the thing we like the best.

I'm a marketer.

I'm a doctor.

Well, what else are you?

It's a hard habit to break, I know.

There are a lot of pieces that make each of us a whole person - color, gender, passions. I wish we as Americans could try to look for the whole person.

We're too sensitive to race. Let's stop focusing on it because we're creating the "other." We're providing the boxes to put people in. Let's focus on humanity.

Fuck the statistics, we just keep living up to them. You tell someone what they will be and they'll be it. You're going to end up in prison. You're going to end up the President. You're going to get pulled over if you keep speeding.

I am sad to say that I'm ashamed of how we act like we stand up for rights, and the American dream, and advancement, and equality, and education, and morality - and really, we display very little of that to the world.

We are not a nation of equal people. We are not a nation of prosperity. One in seven of our citizens is on food stamps. (To qualify for food stamps, you have to make 130% of the poverty level or less.) We are a nation of hatred, of bigots, of uneducated, arrogant fools. And until we learn to accept and tolerate, we will get nowhere.

Let's get together and create a better future.

For everyone.

Dreams

It's been one of those weeks where your dreams are too real. I am living in those moments, making conscious decisions, and ultimately, freely thinking my own thoughts.

That's the weirdest part for me. The thoughts.

I woke up startled, not quite terrified, on Thursday morning. I'd just had a pregnancy-labor dream. I realize I've probably just been reading too much of NPR's Baby Project (it's sort of cute; if you're into that sort of thing, you should check it out).

In my dream, I was in labor, at the hospital, walking around with my mom and wearing one of those horrible hospital gowns. But the strangest part of the dream was that I kept thinking how I was only x amount of time into labor and already bored.

I sincerely hope that someday, my worst fear for childbirth is how bored I am. I reached down and felt my flat stomach and breathed a sigh of relief. Carlos meowed as he usually does when I bother him too early in the morning, and then came up to snuggle me, and I fell back asleep just as the sunlight was starting to creep through the trees that shelter my window from the street.

And last night, again. But nothing like babies this time. Last night I was an assassin. Don't ask - it was one of those vivid, shifting dreams where it's suddenly winter and you're in Minnesota and then you're creeping around a house/building/warehouse and you're killing people. I went down a faux-grass (astroturf) slide like a fish and killed a Japanese guy with crazy hair and a nice suit who happened to be a better at imitating fish movements than me.

That was probably really weird for you, so: Imagine a dark room with a giant, twisty slide that's not a slide at all, but rather an astroturf covered ramp, and in order to get down it with your gun in your hand, you have to flop like a fish. (I'm not even graceful in my dreams. Great.)

This is the prime example of why I'll never work for the CIA. I'm not graceful, I'm bad at stealthily fish-flopping, and I have a conscience.

Usually, these wild dreams mean I have a lot on my mind and that I'm overtired. Surprise! Guess what? Both are correct.

The Chicago trip was so worth it, but it nearly killed me, even though I got to spend most of Monday asleep on the couch (as much as I hated missing work, it was so nice to veg out and watch bad television).

Anyway, I'm hoping to get caught up on my sleep this weekend. Babysitting means I'm usually exhausted by the time I get done, so there's little chance I'll want to go out dancing (which so bums me out - I haven't had one of those wild, reckless and possible regrettable [just kidding] nights in ages). Which means sleep - definitely necessary since I have to work essentially a full day tomorrow. The 9-5 hours I missed on Monday and then more babysitting!

Maybe I'll be able to get to the park before I babysit on Sunday. Or maybe I'll get to work and log more hours! (That's ambitious - it won't really happen and we all know it. I'll sleep, I'll probably make some pasta, I'll be slow to get going - and by then, my weekend will be over.)

But I'm excited for real work tomorrow because I am in creativity mode and thus more prone to devoting my attention to the task of brochure creation. We'll see how it actually turns out.

The Chicago Trip

I didn't blog about my Chicago trip last time, either.

I didn't take any pictures this time, which I'm kind of bummed about.

I think it's because I never know what to say. I don't want to say too much, but I feel like saying too little would damage the experience.

It was perfect.

S picked me up at the airport like a gentleman. He was right on time, too. I misread the text directing me to a quieter pick up location, so he had to do an airport loop to fetch me.

Saturday included a grocery store run, sushi and BLTs for brunch (don't ask - it made me very happy), a softball game - I forgot my sunglasses and nearly died in the heat, and his dad's birthday party. I was determined not to be stressed, and so I wasn't. (That's worked twice this weekend, but failed miserably once. So I'm shooting 2 for 3 on mastering stress.)

It was a very lovely evening. I spent it eating chocolate cake and talking to a million people. I reminded his grandmother that we'd met previously - when she told me she wanted to trip a 4th grader at a basketball game. It was great. I really hope that the consensus was solidly in my favor at the end of the evening.

Sunday was a calm day. I made that watermelon salad and headed to a friend's BBQ. I forgot how hard it is to park in Edgewater (just south of Rogers Park!). The BBQ had been moved inside, thank g-d, because it was miserably warm outside. I went outside to inspect the new grill, stayed outside for about five minutes, and came directly back in.

Then we headed to his mom's for dinner. His mom is also wonderful.

After one too many White Russians, I declared that we need to leave "now!" And so he took me home. That's when, overwhelmed by my own emotions, I began to cry. Such a noob mistake, I can't believe I did that. At least I made it back to the safety of his house so I won't be known in his house as "the girl who cried" for the rest of my life.

Upon missing my flight and spending the morning laying on his couch, sweating in the blistering AC-less heat and sipping a Gatorade, I realized that perhaps the night before hadn't gone so terribly. And by "hadn't gone so terribly," I mean exactly the opposite.

In the end, it was nice to have some time to chat about it. Being able to talk things out before you fly a thousand miles is really helpful. I informed him that I am indeed a girl, I do cry sometimes, and that it doesn't get any worse than what he witnessed (drunk tears are so attractive, let me tell you - nothing says "I'm a great girl, I swear" like puffy, red eyes, frizzy lion hair, and rings of mascara).

His response? "You were mad at me for things I hadn't even done [yet]!"

Ah, welcome to life with the opposite sex, my dear.

I had forgotten how much I love that city. I love the intensity, the illusion of calm, the people, the nights. I didn't get to the lake, to the Bean, anywhere, really, but I went everywhere I needed to go. The nights slipped away from me, standing on a rooftop overlooking the city - lights all around, never-ending noise. And the mornings broke beautiful, warm, sensational.
I felt so alive.

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

This Too Shall Pass

When I was younger, a much more timid version of my current self began wondering what she'd be like when she emerged as an adult.
At the time, I thought that I'd be all grown up by seventeen, probably thanks to the teen magazine that bears the same name.
I thought (or perhaps hoped) that seventeen-year old me would be this popular, put-together young woman.

So when I arrived at seventeen, I was quite unprepared for the harsh realization that I was still awkward and acne-ridden. 

I set my sights on the end of college. 

The beginning of "adulthood" (whatever that means, anyway) brought about the same let down. 

My seventeen-year self would not have been entirely disappointed, although she would may have laughed to think about how her perceptions of her older self were nothing at all like she'd thought. 

And so again, I am realigning my vision of my future self. 

By realigning, I mean throwing it out entirely. 

I always thought that I'd know everything I needed to know about, well, everything by the time I graduated from college. 

Again, a lie. 

I know how to formulate thoughts, to structure ideas in constructive ways, but I don't know everything. 

In fact, I'm entirely convinced I know less now than I did before, as far as bookish knowledge goes. 

It's sort of disappointing, but at the same time, it's a nice call to action as far as intellectual progress goes. 

It's brought about the reactivation of my interest in books. I am carrying with me a book about modern feminism to Chicago, hoping to find time (when not sleeping face-down on the airplane trays) to read it. 

Even that first stressful post-collegiate year was a time of immense personal growth. 

I'm a different person now than I was when I was handed that empty diploma case, or even than when it finally came in the mail. 

I'm sturdier. I mean that mentally, but you know, I'm starting to wonder if this office job gig isn't throwing a wrench in my metabolic prowess. Anyway, we'll revisit that in five years when I'm either still slender or I've gained like 30 pounds. 

I'm self-sufficient. 

I'm wise. (Wiser. Not wise yet, but probably a good deal wiser than before.)

Whatever. I've decided to relish my awkward 20s, that time of exploration and realization. Let them be wonderful.

I'm realizing that I'll probably never be put-together. I live in chaos, I thrive in it. I'm taking baby steps to learn how to be more organized, but let's face it: I'll never be type A. I'll never be nutty about the organization of my closet (once I learn to put my clothes in it); I'll never be nervous about the way the dishes get stacked.

The other day, Mike and I were making dinner. I began cutting some French bread. "No!" He yelled, taking the knife out of my hand and demonstrating how to properly cut the bread. "What if some man is perfect, but he can't get over the fact that you can't cook and you're not organized?"
I shrugged it off.
Any man who wants to be with me is going to have to deal with the fact that I can only make a few basic dishes and that I'm not a good organizer. It's a process.
However, according to Mike, one thing I'm really good at is "scrubbing the bathroom."
So that's something, right?

I'm off to Chicago tonight, hoping that my flight isn't delayed or cancelled due to weather. (Hail hit the airport really hard a couple of nights ago, and damaged a bunch of the planes.) I'd very much like to arrive on time, because I've got a busy weekend ahead. 

There are seriously not enough hours in the day.
Enjoy your weekend!

America

I'm disappointed in myself, a little bit.
Lately, I've really been struggling to understand other people's political viewpoints.
I pride myself on being really open-minded. But with this political-viewpoint problem, I can't wrap my mind around how someone could think some of the things that I disagree with.
I spend a lot of time trying, too. I sit there. I get the pro-life thing (to a certain extent). I get the death penalty thing (again, to a certain extent). I get the religious thing (don't know why - definitely disagree, but I at least understand). But most of it - I guess it's the whole package, seems absolutely absurd to me.

But what I'm going to talk about today sort of goes past the politics (but not far), and delves into what I think of as a human rights problem.

I read an article today about a man who has been detained for 6 months with no charges filed against him in Switzerland (WikiLeaks related).
So I sent out a little tweet about it:
katiemarybarry 

"In civilized places, you don't hold people without evidence and without charges" - says US lawyer. What about Gitmo?  newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/201…

In my mind, that's totally true. We hold ourselves up to be these virtuous, saintly Americans, and yet we engage in the very acts that we condemn. 

Here's the response I received: 

mjgranger1 

@KatieMaryBarry GItmo is used for unlawful combatants in our struggle with Islamist extremists who want to kill us. We don't need "charges."

Who defines them as "unlawful combatants" or as "Islamist extremists" or that they "want to kill us"? We do. And that's the part that's messed up.

mjgranger has written a book about how Guantanamo Bay has saved our lives and blah blah blah, so he's probably just trolling twitter trying to find people to engage in arguments with so the book can be labeled controversial.

But it's still super lame. and super hypocritical. 

I always think of that Ghandi quote, the one that resonates with me more and more every single day of my life: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Here we are proclaiming the greatness of the United States through our worldly posturing, military aggression, and good-samaritan pretenses, yet we fail to act like the free and brave we claim to be. And there's certainly no hint of justice. 

Censorship: Why you shouldn't advocate for it

I wasn't allowed to watch the movies that my friends were watching and I hated it. All I wanted to was to see Titanic. I'll never forget one of my classmates not letting me see a page in her Titanic movie companion book because she knew I wasn't allowed to see the movie. 

My mom still cringes when I mention my first R-rated film (Ronin, when I was in the fourth grade). I don't think I saw another R-rated film until high school. I still have only seen about five episodes of the Simpsons. I remember getting into angsty adolescent skirmishes with my dad because he wouldn't let me buy CDs (when people still bought those) with the "Parental Advisory" stickers on them. My parents were careful, and surprisingly united in their cause to protect us from content they deemed inappropriate.

However careful my parents were to keep me from playing violent video games and from viewing violent images, they neglected to monitor my reading to a certain extent. I'd wait eagerly for mom to finish reading Reader's Digest so I could have it, and she'd always tell me not to read certain articles. 

So those were the first ones I read. And yes, some of them were probably inappropriate for an 8-year old, but they also opened my eyes to the reality of the world around me. (I also watched both the morning and evening news, and Dateline, and stuff like that. I'm consequently terrified of fireworks, boiling water in glass bottomed containers, and swimming pool drains. But as a result, I'm also still alive.) 

Reader's Digest wrote about female genital mutilation years before it was a mainstream topic. Now, they're making a movie about Waris Dirie, the woman whose story appeared in that magazine at some point during my youth. I don't consider that inappropriate at all. I'm grateful. It allowed me to understand something I might not have been able to - and it allowed me to learn without being embarrassed to ask awkward questions. 

As a child, I devoured books. It didn't matter whether they were aimed at children, young adults, or adults, I read them all. My particular favorites were murder mysteries. I loved them. Agatha Christie, Lillian Jackson Braun, and so on. 

One year, someone bought me a big book of murder mysteries from Barnes and Noble. I'll never forget it. That purple and black cover, the fact that it was at least a thousand pages. I thought it would last at least a week (I read so fast that I had to start choosing books based on thickness so they'd last). And I started reading. 

Not far into the book, I came upon a story so grotesque, I had to stop reading. (It concerned the rape and murder of a young girl.) My usual morbid curiosity was gone. I was haunted by what I'd read. I closed the book and hid it at the bottom of my drawer. I never again picked up that book. 

Perhaps my parents would never have given it to me if they'd known what it contained. But it was given to me with the best of intentions - they knew I loved murder mysteries. 

I was young, yes, but I was also old enough to make the decision not to continue reading for myself. 

The article that this post is based on calls into question the maturity of young adults to choose for themselves. What are we exposing our kids to? Today's popular books don't have any new themes in them...Shakespeare wrote about suicide, bloody battles, sex, etc. What is scandalous today becomes blasé tomorrow. 

I didn't only learn about sex because of romance novels - one night, I couldn't sleep and Mom gave me a book and told me not to read past a certain page. I started reading and fell in love with the characters. I read the entire book that night. It remains one of the most romantic stories I've ever read, not because it was inappropriate (it wasn't), but because it was beautiful. I laughed and I cried. I slept well that night, knowing that somewhere, a fictional couple had found that love that all humans strive for. 

Books taught me about history, and tragedy, and famine, and war. I learned about the triumphs of humanity, the beauty of the natural world, the greed that comes with power. 

I don't regret the exposure I had through novels. They prepared me to lead the life I lead today. They taught me about inner strength, gratitude, poise, passion, intelligence, the best way to silence an enemy, all sorts of poisons, drugs, politics, the justice system, common sense, fact, fiction, wild adventures, and magic. They were my greatest escape, my greatest indulgence, the source of much of my happiness. 

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for letting me read. 

The text below comes from a Wall Street Journal article published on June 4, 2011:

Darkness Too Visible

Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?

Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult section of her local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and disheartened.

She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there was, she felt, "nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff." She left the store empty-handed.

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

Journal Community

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it.

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn't turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.

Raul Allen

If you think it matters what is inside a young person's mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn't, on a personal level, really signify.

As it happens, 40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature because there was no such thing. There was simply literature, some of it accessible to young readers and some not. As elsewhere in American life, the 1960s changed everything. In 1967, S.E. Hinton published "The Outsiders," a raw and striking novel that dealt directly with class tensions, family dysfunction and violent, disaffected youth. It launched an industry.

Mirroring the tumultuous times, dark topics began surging on to children's bookshelves. A purported diary published anonymously in 1971, "Go Ask Alice," recounts a girl's spiral into drug addiction, rape, prostitution and a fatal overdose. A generation watched Linda Blair playing the lead in the 1975 made-for-TV movie "Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" and went straight for Robin S. Wagner's original book. The writer Robert Cormier is generally credited with having introduced utter hopelessness to teen narratives. His 1977 novel, "I Am the Cheese," relates the delirium of a traumatized youth who witnessed his parents' murder, and it does not (to say the least) have a happy ending.

Grim though these novels are, they seem positively tame in comparison with what's on shelves now. In Andrew Smith's 2010 novel, "The Marbury Lens," for example, young Jack is drugged, abducted and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of glasses that transport him into an alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, "covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?" No happy ending to this one, either.

In Jackie Morse Kessler's gruesome but inventive 2011 take on a girl's struggle with self-injury, "Rage," teenage Missy's secret cutting turns nightmarish after she is the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. "She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe." Missy survives, but only after a stint as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Books We can Recommend for Young Adult Readers

BOOKS FOR YOUNG MEN:

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010)

This grueling post-apocalyptic National Book Award winner earns its scenes of menace and the odd expletive by believably conjuring a future in which people survive by scavenging materials from the rusting hulks of oil tankers. In a pitiless semi-civilization, one single act of decency launches a young man on a terrifying journey.

Peace by Richard Bausch (2009)

For older teens, a taut World War II novel set in 1944 that evokes the conflicting moral struggles of war. When a detachment of American GIs tramping through the Italian countryside discovers an escaping German soldier and a young woman hiding in the back of a cart, the resulting bloodshed—is it murder or self-defense?—sets off profound reverberations in the men's hearts.

Old School by Tobias Wolff (2004)

Set in a smart New England prep school in the 1960s, this story of a young man's search for authentic identity captures the mixture of longing and ambition that causes so many adolescents to try, if only for a time, to shape themselves along other people's lines. Here, the admired models are writers—Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Robert Frost—who visit the school and for whom the young protagonist contorts himself in painful and revealing ways.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

A science-fiction classic that offers surprisingly mordant commentary on contemporary American life. In a society where rampant political correctness has resulted in the outlawing of books, Guy Montag works as a "fireman" tasked with destroying intellectual contraband. His wife spends her days immersed in the virtual reality projected on screens around her. When Guy accidentally reads a line from a book, he finds himself strangely stirred—and impelled to an act of recklessness that will change his life forever. Teenagers whose families are maddeningly glued to screens may find Guy's rebellion bracingly resonant.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003)

Told (with the occasional expletive) from the unreliable perspective of a high-functioning autistic teenager, this mystery recounts 15-year-old Christopher's effort to solve the killing of a neighborhood dog. When the boy himself falls under suspicion in the animal's death, his violent response propels him toward discoveries that will ultimately overturn his understanding of his own family.

True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)

The movie versions are fine, but they only approximate the drollery and tenderness of this tale of Wild West vengeance. Narrated in retrospect by a rawhide-tough woman named Mattie Ross, the novel recounts her girlhood quest to hunt down her father's killer in lawless Indian Territory, with the aid of dissolute U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn. The brilliance is all in the tone: Beneath Mattie's blunt manner lies a fierce intelligence and wagon-loads of grit. Girls will love this one, too.

BOOKS FOR YOUNG WOMEN:

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (2008)

The events swirling around 15-year-old Evie in this sophisticated National Book Award winner seem to her, in the blinkered way of teenagers, mainly the backdrop to her own sexual awakening. In a story involving deceitful parents, stolen Jewish treasure, a handsome ex-GI, adultery and murder, all set in louche, off-season Palm Beach, it is only when Evie must decide whether to lie—and whom to save—that it is apparent that she is no longer a child.

Ophelia by Lisa Klein (2006)

An inventive retelling of the story of Hamlet from the perspective of beautiful, bewildered Ophelia. In Shakespeare's play, we are meant to understand her as a love-struck medieval girl gone mad. Here she is an intelligent if impractical Elizabethan who, with the help of Queen Gertrude, secretly marries Prince Hamlet, fakes her own death and runs away with—well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

Angelmonster by Veronica Bennett (2005)

This elegant novel introduces us to 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of "Frankenstein," shortly before she meets the dashing poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The events that ensue seem as jolting today as they were to the couple's early 19th-century contemporaries: an adulterous escape from London to Europe, the births and deaths of two children, a sojourn in Italy with the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron (which included a famous night of telling ghost stories), and Percy Shelley's tragic death at sea.

Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien (1973)

A post-apocalyptic novel for adolescents that is all the more frightening for its restraint. It has been a year since all-out nuclear war has left Ann Burden apparently the only girl in the radioactive remains of the United States; thanks to a quirk of geography, her family's farm (but not her family) survived the cataclysm. When she sees a column of distant smoke, Ann realizes that she is not alone, and soon she is nursing back to health a man who turns out not to be the person to play Adam to her Eve.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

This vivid novel of early 20th-century Brooklyn is proof that mature material can be rendered with such subtle humanity that a younger teen can read it with as much enjoyment as a person many years older. I got my copy in a used bookstore when I was 11 and was so entranced by the story of book-loving Francie Nolan and her impoverished Irish-Catholic family—her beautiful mother, her handsome drunken father and various other misbehaving or censorious relatives—that I read it over and over throughout adolescence. Only years later did I grasp everything that happened between the adult characters. Isn't that what being a young reader, or indeed a teenager, is all about?

The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

The novel "Scars," a dreadfully clunky 2010 exercise by Cheryl Rainfield that School Library Journal inexplicably called "one heck of a good book," ran into difficulties earlier this year at the Boone County Library in Kentucky, but not because of its contents. A patron complained that the book's depiction of cutting—the cover shows a horribly scarred forearm—might trigger a sufferer's relapse. That the protagonist's father has been raping her since she was a toddler and is trying to engineer her suicide was not the issue for the team of librarians re-evaluating the book.

"Books like 'Scars,' or with questionable material, those provide teachable moments for the family," says Amanda Hopper, the library's youth-services coordinator, adding: "We like to have the adult perspective, but we do try to target the teens because that's who's reading it." The book stayed on the shelves.

Perhaps the quickest way to grasp how much more lurid teen books have become is to compare two authors: the original Judy Blume and a younger writer recently hailed by Publishers Weekly as "this generation's Judy Blume."

The real Judy Blume won millions of readers (and the disapprobation of many adults) with then-daring novels such as 1970's "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret," which deals with female puberty, 1971's "Then Again, Maybe I Won't," which addresses puberty from a boy's perspective, and 1975's "Forever," in which teenagers lose their virginity in scenes of earnest practicality. Objectionable the material may be for some parents, but it's not grotesque.

By contrast, the latest novel by "this generation's Judy Blume," otherwise known as Lauren Myracle, takes place in a small Southern town in the aftermath of an assault on a gay teenager. The boy has been savagely beaten and left tied up with a gas pump nozzle shoved down his throat, and he may not live. The protagonist of "Shine," a 16-year-old girl and once a close friend of the victim, is herself yet to recover from a sexual assault in eighth grade; assorted locals, meanwhile, reveal themselves to be in the grip of homophobia, booze and crystal meth. Determined in the face of police indifference to investigate the attack on her friend, the girl relives her own assault (thus taking readers through it, too) and acquaints us with the concept of "bag fags," heterosexuals who engage in gay sex for drugs. The author makes free with language that can't be reprinted in a newspaper.

In the book business, none of this is controversial, and, to be fair, Ms. Myracle's work is not unusually profane. Foul language is widely regarded among librarians, reviewers and booksellers as perfectly OK, provided that it emerges organically from the characters and the setting rather than being tacked on for sensation. In Ms. Myracle's case, with her depiction of redneck bigots with meth-addled sensibilities, the language is probably apt.

But whether it's language that parents want their children reading is another question. Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to the words or storylines in young-adult books. In a letter excerpted by the industry magazine, the Horn Book, several years ago, an editor bemoaned the need, in order to get the book into schools, to strip expletives from Chris Lynch's 2005 novel, "Inexcusable," which revolves around a thuggish jock and the rape he commits. "I don't, as a rule, like to do this on young adult books," the editor grumbled, "I don't want to compromise on how kids really talk. I don't want to acknowledge those f—ing gatekeepers."

By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment" or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks "censorship!"

It is of course understood to be an act of literary heroism to stand against any constraints, no matter the age of one's readers; Ms. Myracle's editor told Publishers Weekly that the author "has been on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression."

Every year the American Library Association delights in releasing a list of the most frequently challenged books. A number of young-adult books made the Top 10 in 2010, including Suzanne Collins's hyper-violent, best-selling "Hunger Games" trilogy and Sherman Alexie's prize-winning novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." "It almost makes me happy to hear books still have that kind of power," Mr. Alexie was quoted saying; "There's nothing in my book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet."

Oh, well, that's all right then. Except that it isn't. It is no comment on Mr. Alexie's work to say that one depravity does not justify another. If young people are encountering ghastly things on the Internet, that's a failure of the adults around them, not an excuse for more envelope-pushing.

Veteran children's bookseller Jewell Stoddard traces part of the problem to aesthetic coarseness in some younger publishers, editors and writers who, she says, "are used to videogames and TV and really violent movies and they love that stuff. So they think that every 12-year-old is going to love that stuff and not be affected by it. And I don't think that's possible."

In an effort to keep the most grueling material out of the hands of younger readers, Ms. Stoddard and her colleagues at Politics & Prose, an independent Washington, D.C., bookstore, created a special "PG-15" nook for older teens. With some unease, she admits that creating a separate section may inadvertently lure the attention of younger children keen to seem older than they are.

At the same time, she notes that many teenagers do not read young-adult books at all. Near the end of the school year, when she and a colleague entertained students from a nearby private school, only three of the visiting 18 juniors said that they read YA books.

So it may be that the book industry's ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still, everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn't be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children's lives.