At the mom and toddler's class....

Mom: So, what do you do?

Me: Well, um (so many things all the time is my truth, but no one wants to hear that) I'm a writer.

Mama: What kind?

Me: (Always saying too little or not enough) Young adult near-future dystopian science fiction. At least that's what I've been working on lately.

Mama: What is it with teens and dystopias? Is being a teenager really that hard?

(Other moms laugh and I always feel like there's a weird collective amnesia about what those years are actually like, and so I take a deep breath and decide to say too much.)

Well, I think when you are a teen, that's when you look around and start seeing how truly and thoroughly horrible the world is. For me, I first saw it through gender, then the environment, sexuality, race, and finally class. And it kept growing and getting worse and more tangled until I couldn't look anywhere and not see the way greed and power seeped into everything and how everything sucked. I was seeing the dystopia all around us that is cloaked in all kinds of ways adults called normal, but it wasn't and isn't okay. And when I started to figure out all that I was filled with rage and also total helplessness about what I could do to change any of it. I became vegetarian. I staged some angry one-acts in drama class with my freak friends. I wrote Amnesty International letters every week but I understood that all of it was pretty pointless.

And there weren't any adults who were like, we understand and have a plan. Come join us and we'll change the world together. It will be hard, but we'll get there. (I found those types later in college, which is a different kind of story.) What there was was a lot of adults calling it teen angst and saying that I was overly moody (which of course I was and probably still am), and that high school was a wonderful time of life so don't squander it. And let's eat some fake microwave popcorn and watch a sitcom about fake people and talk about fake things that barely skim the surface.

Enter the dystopian novel, which almost always starts with a kid slowly realizing how horrible their society is, and then soon thereafter changing it either by stumbling into something or coming up with some plan. These books have lots of suffering and hardship, but almost always end with a changed world because some teens somewhere cared and acted out.

Of course, this kind of narrative is a certain kind of naïve fairy tale, but I think we all need stories like this to let us imagine that we could succeed beyond our wildest hopes. I think teens need them even more then the rest of us, because it's so surreal to start seeing the world and be surrounded by people who just don't care. One of my hopes, with writing the kinds of books that I do, is to give teens just enough hope to not give up and do that bullshit adult thing of only caring about themselves.

(And then the moms looked at me in that way that people my age often do, like they thought I was one of them but I'm clearly something different and that's confusing and funky. But then one of them started talking about some dystopic books she loves and how she wants her daughter to read them in ten years and it was great.)

One last thing, any idea that dystopian books for kids is some new hyped up genre? Nope. There is Lord of the Rings, A Wrinkle in Time, Ender's Game, The Giver and all the other books I would read late into the night twenty years ago that thrilled me and gave me hope that somehow, someway, I would do something that mattered.