I’ve been writing books for young people for 30 years, and
people have frequently asked me, “do you have teenagers,” or “do you work with
teenagers?” When I reply “no” to both
questions, they’re surprised, and they want to know how I can write for and about
teens when I’m not around them on a daily basis. I reply, “because I was a teen.” I believe that teens today face the same
problems I faced: a concern for how we look, how are bodies are changing, how
we care about what others think.
Rebellion, peer pressure, sexuality, identity – these are all concerns
of teens, today, yesterday, forever.
But I have to
admit, there are differences between the world I lived in as a teen, and
the world the teen today faces. And that
was my inspiration for writing Gloss – to show teens today that the
teens of my time faced the same predicaments, but in a different world.
Different
how? Well, for one thing, in terms of
technology. We didn’t have mobile phones
or even answering machines for our phones at home. So if you were hoping a certain guy might
call and ask you out, you stayed home and by the phone, yelling at your parents
or siblings if they kept the line busy.
If you had a favorite TV program, you had to be home at the time it was
broadcast – you couldn’t tape it to watch later. We didn’t have personal computers – if you
had to get information, you went to the library.
We didn’t use
birth control pills, and abortion was illegal.
So we were a lot more hesitant about becoming intimate with our
boyfriends – the potential consequences were huge. Girls were expected to be virgins when they
married, and marriage was the goal. In
doing research for Gloss, I obtained copies of magazines that were
popular at the time. I’d read these same
magazines when I was 15, but I’d forgotten about all the ads for the silverware
and china patterns you’d want when you got engaged. Even at the age of 15, you were supposed to
be thinking about these things!
Marriage was
important because there weren’t that many other options for girls. There were careers like teaching or nursing
that were considered acceptable, but a fortunate girl only engaged in these
activities until she could get married, become a housewife and raise children.
Some people
think life was simpler for girls then.
There were rules that were accepted and followed. For example, nice girls didn’t go “all the
way”, and nice boys didn’t expect them to.
But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have the same needs, the same desires
that girls have today – so maybe it wasn’t all that simple.
In writing Gloss,
I wanted to write about four ordinary girls who have the same feelings, the
same concerns, the same joys as girls today, but who live in a time when the
“rules” were different. I hope readers
today will identify with them, and see how circumstances can influence their
decisions.
I hope I
succeeded. I hope you’ll let me know if
I did.
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