#1 Young Adult Reading Notes

Completely Normal by Biffy James

The debut novel Completely Normal (and other lies) by Biffy James started life on the shortlist for the Ampersand Prize and has since been shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Prize, the CBCA awards and the Readings Prize, has won the Griffith University Young Adult Book Award and the shadow-CBCA awards (chosen by teen readers), and most recently has won the Gab Williams Prize (also chosen by teen readers).

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Lit Snobs v. YA Mobs

A decade ago there was an intense phase of articles scolding the adult readers who at the time counted for more than 50% of young adult novel purchases (U.S. figures). The charge: reading beneath their ability and life experience.

I remember where I was when I read the piece at Slate in 2014 that caused uproar — Against YA: Read Whatever You Want. But You Should Feel Embarrassed When What You’re Reading Was Written For Children: I was on a train, heading to a shift at a bookshop where I was the children’s and YA buyer. I was also a fledgling YA author with two novels published, and an avid reader of (mostly) Australian contemporary YA novels.

The gist of these pieces was: adults are better than this! By way of qualifying that, the Slate piece accused YA novels of presenting “the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way” with endings that “are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering”. (Satisfying endings, yes that does sound very embarrassing, go on . . . )

It wasn’t as if writers of children’s and YA weren’t used to you’re better than this. Martin Amis told Sebastian Faulks in an interview: “If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book.” But now readers were fair game, too, under a thin veil of jealousy, superiority and general bafflement.

Basically: the books you unserious types are spending your money on are for people who don’t know anything. The novels you’re waving about are for kids who can’t name the capital of any country and would uber-eat themselves a McFlurry for every meal if we weren’t paying attention.

It’s probably true that the snarky pieces were provoked by a spate of fairly nauseating ones arguing the opposite: confessions from adults who read YA exclusively and called everything else boring, adults shipping teenage characters without reflecting on how strange that may seem to teenagers, and fans who compiled lists of 10, 20, or 50 YA novels that absolutely everyone absolutely must read before they absolutely die.

The “grow up” pieces spawned a louder defence from the “YA or die” crew, and on it went . . .

Over time, I was drawn to a third camp — one that loved YA and hated the snobbery but was concerned about the adult domination pulling YA in a direction that didn’t serve the intended readership. But no one was listening to that camp back then. There were two sides and you had to pick one. Naturally, I was on the proud-to-read-and-write YA side.

However, the books that made me want to champion YA were not the ones constantly cited in these mostly U.S. pieces. Since the beginning, my heart has belonged to Australian YA.

When I was 16, my recreational reading consisted of Fay Weldon, Martin Amis (him again) and the Romantic Poets. What an amazing grasp of failed marriages, screwed up white men of the twentieth century, and screwed up white men of the eighteenth century I must have had. I’m not suggesting that there wasn’t any YA, but after my early teen years it wasn’t on my radar. (We didn’t have radar back then . . .)

Almost ten years later, a friend who worked at Macmillan sent me a copy of Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty, with a note: You will love this. Not only did I love it, that novel made me want to learn how to do it.

The reason for this preamble to my thoughts on Completely Normal is that I don’t read as much YA as I used to. I’m not writing it, my kids have moved on from it, and several of my peers have, too. When I think of my YA heyday, it’s Graffiti Moon (Cath Crowley), Six Impossible Things (Fiona Wood), Everything Beautiful (Simmone Howell), Beautiful Mess (Claire Christian), Amelia Westlake (Erin Gough), The Gaps (Leanne Hall), My Life as a Hashtag (Gab Williams), All I Ever Wanted (Vikki Wakefield), The Dead I Know (Scot Gardner) and many more. In between drifting from YA and starting this newsletter I’ve loved Unnecessary Drama (Nina Kenwood), The Boy From the Mish (Gary Lonesborough), The Museum of Broken Things (Lauren Draper), Before the Beginning (Anna Morgan), and Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over (Miranda Luby), among others.

But even though I haven’t been reading as much, this year YA has been on my mind again because of the loss of Gab Williams in January. The moment Completely Normal was announced as the winner of Readings’ Gab Williams Prize, I picked it up. Two sittings later I can say that there couldn’t be a more perfect book for this prize. Readings’ teen advisory board, aged 14-18, chose it. And I think Gab, a superbly witty and clever writer, would have agreed with them.

Completely Normal reminded me precisely and profoundly of why I badly wanted to write, and read, YA.

Completely Normal by Biffy James, published July 2022 by Hardie Grant

Spoiler: love hurts

In Completely Normal, voice and structure are everything, story beats are hit with precision — and love hurts, I mean it really fucking hurts. The story begins with a school assembly announcing the death of popular student Isaac. Narrator Stella, cynical, unpopular, and a little numb by our early reckoning, lets the reader know that for her to mourn Isaac publicly is against the rules. She shows us how openly and acceptably Isaac’s girlfriend is mourning him — Isaac’s beautiful, popular girlfriend. With that established, we go back — the first half of the book is about Stella and Isaac falling for each other just before he died.

This is a risk, though it does have solid precedents, such as Rebecca James’ Cooper Bartholemew Is Dead (2014), which starts with Cooper’s body found at the bottom of some cliffs, and traces a love story with his girlfriend, Libby. I always think of that book as Cooper Bartholemew Is Not Dead, because the characters were so well drawn that I kept hoping the big reveal would be “surprise! he’s fine!”

On the surface of it, who wants to read a love story that starts with a funeral? Will a reader invest in a romance when they’ve already been assured that it has no future?

In Completely Normal, Biffy James goes about her early scene-making and character-building with a mix of laid-back coolness and heart-rending vulnerability. Stella is funny and terribly lonely. Isaac is a good egg, and handsome, with a sad past. You’re drawn into that classic sense of expectation that falling-in-love stories deliver. In the next breath you remember that it is doomed.

By adulthood, I suppose we understand that it’s human nature to keep wanting that risky, doomed thing. We know we’re an adorably ridiculous species. Reading this story in middle age is a reminder of how it felt before we knew everything and had lived it several times over. What a gift! The writing is quick and clever and the emotional landscape has great clarity. Just as skilful is what the author doesn’t say but leaves us to infer.

At roughly halfway comes a reminder that this is a bold story — the moment where we must accept that Isaac is dead (again) and the story, and Stella, and the reader, all have to carry on without him. The love we invested in was over before it began. It is the reading equivalent of making yourself get out of bed when you can’t see the point. Again, Biffy James excels, creating an unexpected, tension-filled pathway for Stella.

Completely Normal invites you to feel something, but it isn’t overdone or demanding. Astonishingly, it isn’t depressing, but also not at all glib. As for that old charge in Slate that YA novels deliver “the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way”, that’s not what Stella is about (or most Australian contemporary YA, I’d argue). Not only is the story structure risky, Stella is risky. She doesn’t do the nice thing, the right thing, or the honest thing. She is, of course, completely normal.

Adults may be reading about Isaac’s death and Stella’s grief not just as an ex-teenager who loved and lost but now as the parent of a teenager of any gender. We may have an Isaac or a Stella currently leaving wet towels and dirty dishes around our house, or have mini teenagers in training. We may wince knowingly at the parents, who are completely dense, say the wrong things and know nothing (just as it should be).

Lately . . .

. . . it feels as if that third camp I mentioned, those worried that adult domination of YA discourse could ruin it for the intended readership, has a hand on the steering wheel. Appointing the teen advisory board to choose the Gab Williams Prize is a good example of this.

Of Completely Normal, the judging panel said:

“This book embodies teenage mistakes.
It is poignant, earnest, and real . . . Completely Normal made us feel seen.”

What a recommendation. And one that no adult is qualified to make about a YA novel.

I’ll happily say that I am still not better than adoring a YA novel like this, feeling it deeply, and admiring it as a writer.

• Read the full judges’ comments for the Gab Williams Prize

• Read Bookseller, black belt, ‘neon-bright’ talent: the unfathomable loss of acclaimed Australian YA author Gabrielle Williams, by Simmone Howell

• Listen to the ABC radio programme How teacher Biffy James landed her first book deal

• Visit the revamped #LoveOzYA website to find out more about Australian young adult literature.

• Listen to author Zanni Louise interview Biffy James on The Sunshine House

Thank you for reading Voracious.