Places I Never Meant to Be, Judy Blume

Censorship: Given the underage readership of YA literature, it is impossible to discuss the genre without also discussing the issue of censorship. Because the primary readers of YA fiction have generally not reached the age of majority, they are often not free to decide what they can read, and there is no shortage of people willing to make that decision for them by trying to censor their reading material. The censors object to literary representations of sex, drugs, and alcohol, believing that depictions of these things will encourage teens to experiment. They are infuriated by the presence of profanity in literature as they fear adolescents will learn to swear from these books. They object to stories about rape, death, disease, divorce, spirituality, sexuality, poverty, racism, and sexism since they don't want teens confronted with the ugly realities of life at such a tender age. They try to repress works where adults are represented as less than trustworthy because they want teens to unquestioningly obey authority. They object to what they see as anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-American themes. And they are upset that the works don't represent a world governed by one central authority that might demonstrate evidence of divine providence, but instead seems all too real and messy. But what ever upsets the censors, they have one thing in common: they believe that teens lack the critical thinking skills to question what they read, to put ideas in context, and not be so influenced by it that they will imitate whatever they see. And perhaps most of all, they fear that teens will ask questions and challenge authority rather than passively accept what they're told. This censorship debate is not new either. In the 1950s, there were congressional hearings about the allegedly pernicious influence of horror comics on youth resulting in the industry agreeing to self-censor itself for two decades. This nearly killed horror comics. In the 1868 children's novel Little Women, Jo's future husband Professor Baher expresses dismay that she earns her living writing adventure stories for boys, works that he deems "sad trash" that corrupt children.

Rites of Passage: In Judy Blume’s collection Places I Never Meant to Be adolescents are faced with very adult problems such as rape, death, disease, divorce, spirituality, sexuality, poverty, racism, sexism, and the duplicity of adults. So often adults have an overly sentimental view of adolescence, that it is a magical time where everything is a sugar-coated dream, or at the very least, that literature for adolescents should represent this phase in their lives in this overly rosy and unrealistic way. But of course, the opposite is true. Adolescence is a liminal time, between childhood and adulthood, when teens discover (if they didn’t know already) that the world can be a dangerous place and that adults can’t always protect them. It’s a time when teens find themselves inhabiting nearly grown bodies and negotiating the privileges of adulthood. It’s a time when teens must make serious decisions on their own. The stories in this collection all treat these themes. Sarabeth in “Meeting the Mugger” and Ashleigh in “Ashes” learn that adults aren’t always trustworthy: they make mistakes, they lie, they fall in and out of love, and that doing all of these things don’t make them completely bad people. And Aaron in “You Come, Too, A-Ron” already knows that even the most well-intentioned adults such as Mr. Poz cannot completely protect him. Though Mr. Poz and the others in juvenile detention do what they can to find their charges somewhere safe and warm, they fight an uphill battle with an overburdened and under-funded social welfare system. If Aaron wants to become a young man with the power to control his destiny, he will have to endure an unpleasant, and even dangerous existence in an institutional setting so that he can at least complete his high school education.

In more traditional cultures, adulthood is marked by ceremonies. Some Native American tribes have naming ceremonies where members are given or choose their adult names. Other cultures celebrate a boy’s passage to manhood when he is taken on his first hunt, or a girl’s passage to womanhood when she has her first period.¹ Afterwards, members of the group have left childhood behind and have the full responsibilities and privileges of an adult. One of the critiques of modern culture is that there is a dearth of events that definitively mark the passage from childhood into adulthood and so teens are left in a liminal state, wondering when they will truly be adults. Instead, the passage into adulthood is often so gradual as to be nearly imperceptible. In each story, the teenaged protagonists have experiences that mark their transition from childhood to adulthood. Jody in “Going Sentimental” has sex with Mackey, her long-time boyfriend, not due to any overwhelming sexual desire on the part of either, but rather, because the loss of virginity is often touted as the event that signifies the transition from innocence to experience. But Jody is disappointed by the experience as it was mundane rather than transcendent. Aaron in “You Come, Too, A-Ron” has never really had a normal childhood that would make him anxious to hasten its demise in favor of a more responsible and rewarding adulthood. And Sarabeth in “Meeting the Mugger” must revise her opinion about the defining event of the title. On the night she’s mugged, she believes that “this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me” (29) but a few weeks later when it is discovered that her mother is terminally ill, she must revise this opinion about what qualifies as the worst thing that ever happened to her. The cuts on Sarabeth’s back as a result of the mugging are emblematic of this experience. She can feel them, sort of, but cannot see them, just as at the time, she cannot truly understand why this moment in her life will really be significant. And in “Ashes,” Ashleigh’s illusions about her father are replaced with the knowledge of his all too human frailties when he asks her to steal money from her mother so he can pay off a loan shark.

In "Spear," Adrian questions what his mother and those around her have always told him about white people and the death of his father, ultimately deciding to not pursue the life that she has planned out for him. Instead of following in his father's footsteps and making anti-white speeches, Adrian decides to continue being the person who is always stopping fights. Norma Jean too attempts to resist the life her parents have planned for her, but she has less agency than Adrian. While both characters face strong disapprobation from friends and family for their interracial relationship, Adrian's personality makes it easier to openly resist the pressure put on him. Norma Jean is a lot more shy and less able to openly stand up for herself, and her only way of rebelling against her parents is to call Adrian in secret.

Adults Are Unreliable: We see this in "Ashes" and "You Come, Too, A-Ron." In "Ashes," the story begins deceptively. Ashleigh's father is a dreamer who always has faith in her daughter, although it is frequently misguided. Her mother, while far more reliable, is not the fun parent since she would never encourage her daughter to be a model, an astronaut, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. She won't even deviate from calling Ashleigh by her name, although she didn't choose it and really hates it. But we see quickly that Ashleigh's father is worse than just a dreamer who is always a day late and a dollar short. His prodigality has caused him to borrow money from dangerous men, and now he wants his daughter to steal for him. This is one of those "rites of passage" where Ashleigh learns about the nature of her father.

We also see that adults are unreliable in "You Come, Too, A-Ron." The child welfare system is a sorry testament to this maxim. Through no fault of her own, Aaron's mother is completely undependable as a parent, and so her son is left in the foster care system to survive as best he can. But the foster care system is under-resourced, and so kids are left to languish, and are often worse for their experience here. The entire system demonstrates that adults in the form of the state are completely undependable in that they not only don't put money into caring for families in the first place, but also don't even do a good job of taking care of the result when families collapse.

In "Ashes," Ashleigh is on the verge of learning a valuable lesson when she is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to "borrow" her mother's $200 so her father can pay off a loan shark. But Aaron seems to have already learned his lesson. If adults aren't dependable, then he has to step up to the plate and do something himself. He won't go to Oakmount out of any concern for himself, but he'll do it so that Kenny, a kid he just met, at least has some chance at stability. And helping Kenny also helps Aaron too. Through Kenny, Aaron has a connection to someone who cares about him. He can create a family of sorts.

But adults also cannot be around to guide teens through every significant passage in their lives. In "Meeting the Mugger," adults such as Sarabeth's mother are all too mortal, and people like Leo are merely human. Just because Leo breaks up with Sarabeth's mother and takes up with Pepper Rudman, who unlike Sarabeth's mother, is someone you would look at twice, does not make him a bad person. And in "Going Sentimental" we would think that there was something seriously wrong with parents who were too involved with their children losing their virginity. Instead, in our culture it is fairly normal for young adults to find a private space and lose their virginity. And Mackey and Jody seem to have "taken" their parents (or other adult authority figures) with them as they lose their virginity. Both have taken to heart the need for Mackey to wear a condom during sex, and all Jody can think about during the act is her aunt Tilley. Is Aunt Tilley some sort of parental figure for Jody, who would either be horribly disappointed by her loss of virginity, or perhaps understand if she were to find out? We never find out, but it is significant that she does think of Aunt Tilly while losing her virginity. In this way we know that Jody is continually influenced by her family in a positive way. They have done a good job of raising a responsible daughter, who even remembers to give the dog a treat and clean his footprints off of the floor before leaving the house.

Identity: In "The Beast Is in the Labyrinth," John attempts to form his own identity as much by putting distance between himself and others as by making connections with different people. When he changes the spelling of his name from Jon to John, he is putting distance between himself and the father he never knew. His father named him Jon, but since the man never bothered to live with his family, John puts the "h" back into his name as an act of disowning this parent. And part of the reason John only applies to colleges out of the city could be due to his need to outrun some family connections. True, he doesn't seem to have any animosity towards his mother or his sister Temmi, but he does seem to want to get away from them, and from the city as well, in order to form a new identity. But John learns that this identity isn't always easy to outrun, and perhaps he doesn't have it in him either to cut himself off completely from this part of his life. He says that he returns home to visit because he got a discount on the train, but he also seems genuinely worried about his sister and mother.

In "Going Sentimental" in some ways Jody constructs her identity in a non-traditional way. She sees herself as extremely un-girly--she describes herself as five-ten, allergic to make-up, and able to bench one and a half times her own body weight (59). This is the reason she believes that her loss of virginity hasn't been the transcendent experience for her that it allegedly is for those girls who caucus with one another about their boyfriends and the minutia of signification behind someone looking at them or neglecting to call. But on the other hand, she feels sufficient pressure from her culture to lose her virginity. When she comments that people are shocked that she and Mackey have waited this long to have sex (55), she is demonstrating to what degree the ideas others about what is normal are important to her.

And in "You Come Too, A-Ron," we see the beginnings of Aaron's adult identity as well. When Aaron decides to go to Oakmount so that he can come see Kenny on the weekends, and Kenny can call him whenever he wishes, we are seeing that Aaron is becoming the adult influence in someone's life that he wishes he had. He seems determined not to reproduce what has happened to his for the first 17 years of his life. Aaron is perhaps on track to become like Mr. Poz, maybe even seeing social work as his life's calling.

In "Ashes" Ashleigh experiences an event that shows her definitively which parent she'll take after. Ashleigh has qualities of both parents. She can be a dreamer like her father in that every time she goes to visit him, the winter sun seems brighter, and the moon too seems brighter on the way home, but she can also be very practical like her mother. When her father offers her dinner, Ashleigh adds up the cost of each option wondering if he can afford it. And when he takes her to the diner and sits facing the door, she is sufficiently astute to read his body language and knows that something is up. When her father puts her in an untenable position at the end of the story, one where she has to betray her mother in order to make him happy, it seems fairly clear that Ashes will end up like her mother, regardless of whether or not she gives her father her mother's emergency money. Just being asked to do this is enough for Ashleigh to understand her father's nature and not to want to be like him. She may continue to love him, but she will never fully trust him, and certainly won't want to be too similar to him.

Of course, this "adult identity" or "essential self" that emerges in YA fiction is itself a fiction. Identity is never a stable or singular thing. However, YA fiction generally represents another cultural convention, the idea of adolescence as a privileged time in life, a sort of dress rehearsal for adulthood, which is seen as a static entity characterized by many fewer changes than this time in one's life.

1. Sadly, menarche is generally celebrated in the negative. It’s often seen as a sign that a girl has an “unclean” woman’s body which must be dealt with through isolation, and sometimes even through something as radical as female circumcision, better known as female genital mutilation.