Sara Zarr: My New Favorite YA Author

Last week I spent three days at the Festival of Faith & Writing. One of the great discoveries of the conference for me was Sara Zarr, a young adult novelist I had heard of vaguely (I think Story of a Girl blipped onto my radar when it was a National Book Award finalist a few years ago, but I hadn't read it). I almost didn't attend Zarr's talk; the description in the program said she would "discuss the usefulness of examining the pain of the transition from childhood to adulthood, with particular attention to how this fits in for writers of faith."

I wasn't so sure I wanted to hear a talk about pain. But nothing else in that time slot jumped out at me, and my friend Julie was going to Zarr's session, so I tagged along.

I'm so glad I did.

Zarr writes young adult novels, and she is interested in the transition from childhood to adulthood that adolescents are engaged in. She says (I'm paraphrasing from memory and certainly won't do her argument justice, so if it sounds dumb, blame me, because Zarr was amazingly articulate) that adolescents are wrestling with big truths about life: that some mistakes can't be undone; that people aren't always what you thought they were; that pain cannot be avoided, but is part of life. This wrestling is what she's interested in writing about, and she wants to write truthfully for young adults about how complicated and unresolved it can all be. She says, "If you get to the end of the book and she's got the car and the boy, and her skin has cleared up, you've entered the realm of fantasy, of wish-fulfillment. You've stopped respecting your readers and they will know it and they will stop respecting you."

It's a very interesting position for a Christian writer to take, but it makes her the kind of Christian I like, the kind that recognizes that faith doesn't remove the problems from your life, but gives you a framework for wrestling with them.

I read Story of a Girl while I was at the conference, and was very impressed with it. It's the story of a girl (is there any other way to start this sentence? I think not.) whose father catches her having sex with a 17-year-old boy when she is 13 years old. In the three years since, he has not really looked at her or talked to her. Meanwhile, the boy in question has told so many stories about her that her whole life is affected by people's perception that she is a particularly slutty slut.

That's a big problem to give a teenager, and when the book starts, Deanna Lambert has been carrying it for three years. Zarr is interested in how such a problem can be dealt with, but she doesn't offer any easy resolution. Nothing magical happens to lift Deanna out of the pain of her life. For instance, her older brother wants her to save the money she earns at a summer job to go to college, it's not at all clear that Deanna thinks such a thing is possible. She and the boy she had sex with three years earlier encounter each other unexpectedly, and they do manage to work some things out, but by the end of the book Deanna and her father have managed only one very tentative normal conversation.

Zarr said, "I like there to be some momentum," and there definitely is: that one tentative conversation between Deanna and her father is a big deal after three years of cold. But there's not the kind of "I've always loved you, Muffin," conversation that resolves so many parent-child misunderstandings in books. After listening to Zarr speak, when I read Story of a Girl I thought about how many YA books I read about working-class or poor kids with potential that had some kind of magical event solve their problems: a teacher, say, who takes a special interest and applies for a college scholarship for the kid without telling her, and she wins it!

Nobody's fixing things for Deanna. Her mother pretends everything is OK. Her boss at the pizza parlor is a confidante and helpful advisor, but he doesn't do more than offer a sympathetic ear and the occasional ride home. Deanna has a fantasy that she will move out of the house with her brother and his girlfriend when they have saved enough to get their own place. Her brother squashes that notion. He's not unsympathetic, but he says, "You have to find your own way out of here." That sentence could be the thesis of the book: it really is up to Deanna.

I could imagine some teens not wanting to read a book like this. There is something to be said for escaping into wish-fulfillment--when I was a kid, I loved books in which a child who had somehow ended up living with the wrong people, was discovered to actually belong elsewhere, where she was fully loved and valued. It's a very common trope in children's literature, so I was well-supplied with stories even in the days before Harry Potter got an Owl from Hogwarts and was rescued from his Muggle relations.

Some kids might prefer the story that ends with the car, the boy, the college scholarship, the clear skin, over a book that says, "Things do get better, but the change is often as much inside you as outside, and you have to work for it, and it may never be as good as you hope." And some parents might prefer books in which 13-year-olds never have sex and nobody swears. But Zarr's novel is full of compassion for her protagonist; she's neither a writer who avoids truthiness nor one who throws in sordid details for the heck of it. She likes protagonists who are in really tough situations, facing hard questions, and need to find their way out, and she likes to give them one or two hints and a nudge in the right direction. I liked her, and I liked her book.