Romance and Sex in YA Novels

When I was in junior high, there was this one super-cool girl. She had the most beautiful name, Shoana, which I thought was close to Sarah and, therefore, we had to be friends. Shoana lived with her mom in an apartment by school; their relationships seemed to me more like roommates than mother-daughter.  I lived in a town house with my estranged parents and ten siblings. Shoana wore dark Jordache jeans with a brown Members Only jacket and applied eyeliner and mascara like Cleopatra. I wore whatever was handed down to me, trying to pass off my too-short jeans (floods) as stylishly cropped. I wore Coke-bottle-like glasses, so I didn’t bother with eyeliner or mascara.

At lunch, we sat at a long table. Right, the “we” implies we were friends, and you’re wondering how I was friends with this super cool eighth grader. I am honestly not sure why. I guess she was also nice. There are some nice, super-cool people in the world. Well, at lunch she’d bring books — her mom’s books, thick romance novels with her mom’s notes in the margins. Shoana surreptitiously passed around the book and whispered to us which pages to read. I’d put the book in my lap and read a few lines at a time pretending I didn’t have the book and was not reading about sex at the eighth grade lunch table. I don’t recall any lunch supervisor snatching the book from us at any point. Heck, I don’t recall there being a lunch supervisor.  We were sneaky about reading this book because this book did not come from our school library — no Dewey  decimal on this one. When I was in junior high, we only read whole-class novels, and this was no Lord of the Flies, but we were studying it, looking for insights or any clue as to what sort of “romance” might be in our futures. Perhaps, we hid the book because there were messages all around us telling us that we were not supposed to be curious about romance,and certainly not about sex. School was not for “that” sort of education.

At that point in my life, the most romantic thing that happened to me was that Ryan Shepherd bought me an ice cream sandwich, which was, at the time, the best thing that ever happened to me. Anybody paying attention to me was appreciated, but an ice cream sandwich? Well. Growing up in a Catholic family, we did not talk about romance. We certainly did not talk about sex because there was no such thing, except the neighborhood kids tried to explain that my parents knew a lot about it because there was an Aikman in every grade 2nd through 12th. Still, Shoana’s mom’s books offered me a glimpse into a world I would not experience for years to come in part because it just sounded, well, scary. I knew I was not ready for it at eighth grade.

Shoana’s mom’s book was not written for me, for us. It was written for Shoana’s mom. Those annotated scenes did not help me understand what it means to date as a teen or what healthy  intimacy looks and feels like. My own mom was no help because, well, we’re Catholic (need I say more). I have eight older siblings but no access to their innermost thoughts or the private conversations of navigating love and life. I did not have access to any books that helped me imagine different versions of romance and certainly not representations of teenagers.

I stumbled through my teens and early twenties carrying pain, disappointment, and self-doubt into relationships until one person offered me a glimpse of what love and friendship can be. I married him, and twenty-five years later, as wonderful as our marriage is, we’re always becoming.

Relationship Education in Schools

What relationship education do schools offer our students? Well, in Illinois we have Erin’s law. Teachers in our school are responsible for leading discussions about healthy relationships with our junior high students. Erin’s Law is named after Erin Merryn, a survivor of childhood sexual assault. In 26 states, Erin’s Law requires all public schools to implement a prevention-oriented child sexual abuse program.

To meet the Erin’s law mandate in seventh grade, I led a forty minute lesson about respect for self and peers, which was essentially a lesson on harassment. We talked about three types of sexual harassment: verbal, written, and physical. We talked about flirting as wanted and mutual and sexual harassment as unwanted.

In eighth grade,we talked about respect in dating and how the best relationships are balanced. A healthy relationship makes you feel good about yourself and has mutual trust. Healthy means you both have outside interests and friends and allow each other to feel and express anger in appropriate ways. Healthy means you introduce each other to family and friends. The message is about noticing that lack of balance when someone has more power and may be controlling with physical, verbal, sexual, and/or digital abuse.

Erin’s Law curriculum in our district offers more discussion about relationships than I had with any adult when I was in junior high, and even though there is no explicit talk of sex, many teachers are uncomfortable with taking on this social-worker-type role in our classes. On one hand, many teachers have their own relationship traumas, which makes it that much more difficult to take this topic up as part of our jobs. On the other hand, many teachers do not think our job is to educate students on healthy relationships.

I actually do support the Erin’s Law initiative, but I think it is insufficient. Schools are not talking about the very real experiences many students are already having in their “romantic” relationships. On a daily basis, students’ love and wounds from love waft or crash into the classroom. To be clear, I am not saying that I want to talk about romance and sex with students, though I am willing to be a supportive ear when needed. I am saying that I can’t possibly offer students the sort of access they need to knowledge and experiences in a scheduled lesson plan. What I am saying is that I think books can actually do a better job than a forty-minute, class-wide conversation with a few talking points on a slideshow.  I am saying that a book can do what teachers can’t do and when teachers can’t. We can offer students access to books and access to us for conversation about those books. Teaching is impossibly challenging, but when I think of all the authors willing to help, it feels possible — especially when it comes to considering teen love and relationships.

Books Offer Imaginative Rehearsal

Schools have to educate the whole person and part of that person is their sexuality. When teens read books, they have access to what Kenneth Burke calls “imaginative rehearsal” or experience through reading how a character confronts,  grapples, and navigates issues that the reader may or may not every face their life. The dialogue in the narrative can give the reader language that may solve a problem or perpetuate a misunderstanding. The inner monologue can offer insight into problem solving — flawed or clever. The character interaction can offer the reader a mirror or window into how different people argue, wound, and heal.

Imaginative rehearsal supports perspective taking and empathy. Inside a book, a reader has safe place to, well, imagine a situation and observe the what if of the experiences. The book can be opened and closed by the reader; the reader controls the imaginative rehearsal.

Some teens will find the rehearsals when they are curious or when they are in a position to experiment. Sometimes those will be safe and sometimes not. Such rehearsals can be actual (dating, sex, sexting) or virtual (video games, Netflix,books). They’ll figure out relationships are complicated. They’ll figure out what hurts. And some will have experiences that cause deep wounds that never quite heal. I figured it out, but I did it mostly alone and would have liked to have some imaginative rehearsals, especially if it could have saved me some wounds I still carry today. With books, students can safely glimpse intimacy in context without shame.

As a class, we read just one or two books a year. The whole-class novel does not offer students access to the right book at the right time, which is why I make time every day for students to read self-selected texts. During the independent reading time, I work my way around the room to confer with students about their reading experiences. I read everything students read, so during the conference, I ask questions to get a sense of how carefully they are reading and how the book fits with or complicates what they know and understand about the world.

The Books

I imagine many  English teachers already have books on their shelves with teen love stories. However, some books don’t make it into students’ hands because teachers are nervous about the content, and I get it. I am nervous, too.

I will never forget an email from a eighth grade parent outraged that her daughter was reading Sula. Sula witnessed her mother and grandmother in casual romantic relationships, and Sula and her friend Nel develop an intimate relationship. Sula learns to use her sexuality to control men connecting her sexual prowess with personal worth. This student had selected Sula from a list a “college-bound” literature list, and I don’t think it was a good match for this student. I don’t think Sula was written for teens. Too many “classics” we teach over and over are not. I am glad the mom reached out to me. This was a turning point in my teaching because it was the next year when I made conferring with students every day a priority.

Here are the three books that prompted this post.One came to me from the student, one from We Need Diverse Books, and one from a friend with Vamos a Leer. There are certainly others, and I look to you to share these in the comments.

Milk and Honey, by Rupi Kaur, is a collection of poetry and prose about violence, abuse, love.  It’s about being a women, being resilient, finding the sweet in the bitter. Kaur shares her wounds from love with nuance but she also nurtures her readers with words of healing her heartache. I don’t think this book was written with teen readers in mind, but teens hear Kaur as she speaks to and deliberately cares for her reader’s heart. Dozens of eighth grade girls have read this book in recent weeks — they bought the book from Barnes and Noble with their own money (yes, a brick and mortar book store). And, they are passing around to anyone interested the poetry of Milk and Honey. I only read it after one student recommended it via text. (It is certainly not Shoana’s mom’s romance novel.) Two girls told me during our conference that they read it together over a few days while waiting for the bus in the morning. They told me they read aloud each page but only talked about it when they came to the end of the chapter. The content is mature, no doubt, but this book is offering something to teens that they want, likely need in a way that only Rupi Kaur can.

Out of the Darkness, by Ashley Hope Perez, is set in New London, Texas in 1937 within the context of the worst school disaster in American history, a school explosion. But this story is really about Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller, a story of young love in a time when signs like “no Negroes, Mexicans, or dogs” forces them to love in a hallowed out tree by the river. The book review on “Vamos a Leer: Teaching Latin America Through Literacy” is so close to what I would say about this book that I’ll just refer you to that site. Read the suggestions and comments, too. But here is why I think older teens should read this book: the relationship between Naomi and Wash is beautiful. Amidst brutal scenes of incest and rape by her stepfather, there are sweet moments between Naomi and Wash where Naomi learns what love is supposed to feel like and that she is worthy of that love.

Everything, Everything, by Nicola Yoon, is about Madeline Whittier who cannot leave her house because she has Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease or a less clinical and more crass “bubble girl/boy disease.”  Any exposure to a virus or bacteria could kill her. With only her mother to manage her disease (existence), her life is a permanent imaginative rehearsal until Olly moves in across the street. They communicate via text, but she keeps her disease a secret from Olly in the hopes that she can experience some version of love. Their love is forbidden on many levels, but it is a love that both Madeline and Olly need desperately. Every students who reads this book loves it.

I can go on and on like with David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy and Melinda Lo’s Ash, but which books do you think can offer students imaginative rehearsal in romance and love?

A Little “Loving” Advice

1. Offer Kate Messner’s letter to parents about your classroom library, “Heading Off Book Challenges.” This letter offers a smart, sensitive rationale for a diverse classroom library without censorship. Talk to students about their family’s values and consider their parents’ preferences as they select books.
2. Book talk books that stretch students’ ideas of teen relationships into different social contexts and time periods; frame the story along the lines of how the relationships interacts with setting.
3. Read the books your students are reading so that you can support them in their reading experience if needed. Let them know you are aware of the characters and their relationships. Ask questions: Do you think this relationship is healthy? What is making this relationship work? What is complicating it?
4. Essentially, check in with your readers before, during, and after they read. Know your readers, and consider what you know when recommending books. Ask students how they are feeling with the content as they read. And when they’ve finished the book, ask your students who they can recommend the book to and why. Ask what they learned about people, choices, and life after spending a few hundred pages with these characters.