Why I’ve Returned to YA Fiction Nearly 40 Years After Publishing My Second Young Adult Novel
Author Elizabeth Harlan discusses writing two young adult novels in the 1980s and then taking nearly 40 years off until publishing her third.
I didn’t set out to write Young Adult novels, but because they feature teen protagonists, my first books, Footfalls (Atheneum 1982) and Watershed (Viking 1986), got picked up and published as YA fiction. When I was growing up, novels weren’t separated into categories defined by age-targeted readership. Despite their teen protagonists, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) were just novels, not YA novels, a relatively new genre established by the American Library Association in 1957, when it formed its Young Adult Services Division targeting teen readers.
So at first I was surprised and somewhat uneasy about being categorized as a writer of Young Adult fiction. Did this mean my books would only be read by teenagers? Did this mean what I was writing was somehow less literary? Did this mean I would never be published as an author of another genre? These misgivings festered, and for some years I was stalled.
In the late 1980s, hoping to jumpstart a new direction, I enrolled in the Columbia writing program and earned an MFA in fiction. My thesis consisted of a set of autobiographically linked short stories about growing up. I showed them to my agent, who had sold my YA novels. She advised that this new project was too gentle, not edgy enough to compete with similar but more cutting edge work that overshadowed what I’d written. It felt as though she was telling me that these other, successful works were more grown up, that my work was immature. Deeply disappointed, I put my thesis in a drawer and lost my way for several years.
This explains why my next book, an adult biography of French, 19th century George Sand (Yale University Press 2004), marks a departure from writing YA. I dug deep into the life of this famous and iconic feminist author and hitched my literary wagon to her star. But curiously, as I look back, George Sand is very much on a continuum with my novels that feature teen protagonists. It’s George Sand’s complicated development as a young girl growing up and her subsequently troubled relationship with her own daughter, Solange, that captured my imagination and became the fulcrum of my focus. Quite clearly, the thematic thread of girls coming of age, facing adversity, struggling for identity, and prevailing had woven itself into the warp and weft of my writing.
Fast forward to 2020 and the Covid pandemic. Sequestering by myself at home on a little barrier island off Florida’s Gulf coast, I woke up one bright, sunny morning and took my Columbia MFA thesis out of the drawer, sat down with a cup of coffee, and read it again for the first time in 40 years. There it is, I told myself, the story I need to tell, or re-tell, as it were, in a form that captures the singular experience of the character who became 15-year-old Carly Klein. Like Stevie Farr in Footfalls, Carly fuses elements from my own life growing up with her own individual and unique story of coming of age.
For me, as for many girls and boys, adolescence was an exquisitely emotional and intense time of life. The impressions of people, places, events, and relationships that I developed in those years have remained present and vivid in my imagination. Maybe it’s simply that what stirred me then stirs me again as I give “voice” to my young characters, but whatever the reason, they speak to me with all their heart and I hear them loud and clear.
Becoming Carly Klein, my third YA novel (SparkPress 2024), tells the story of a high school student who invents an identity as a Barnard College sophomore to attract the attention of her psychiatrist mother’s patient, Daniel, a blind senior at Columbia College. Much as with the teen protagonists’ respective journeys in Footfalls, Watershed, and George Sand, Carly confronts conflict, brings crises upon herself, and gains self-awareness as she comes of age.
In a very real way, this traces a similar trajectory to what I’ve undergone as I’ve faced and overcome my own doubts and insecurities as a writer. I could wax eloquent about the literary, stylistic, technical challenges of writing, but that’s not actually the hurdle I’ve had most difficulty scaling. For me, my greatest challenge has been emotional and psychological. Like my teen protagonists, I’ve had to discover who I am in order to embrace who I’ve become. There’s something about writing from the point of view of an adolescent that frees me up to describe experiences and to express feelings that connect me still and always with my impressionable and formative teenage years, which are key to who I’ve become and to the work I’ve been doing.
The most magical part of my Becoming Carly Klein journey has actually been the healing I’ve experienced in bringing this novel to fruition. Something about Carly’s own lack of self-confidence and the ways in which she overcomes immense hurdles on the way to discovering the joy of being herself has inspired me to take a lead from my own leading character, who at novel’s end, “Suddenly feels glad for something she used to resent but which has come to feel much better. Now she’s glad to be Carly Klein.”
Check out Elizabeth Harlan's Becoming Carly Klein here:
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