I’m a bit late. Okay, a lot late. The horrible decade that was the 2000s has been over for several weeks now. But I have a lot to say about the really good stuff that happened in that soon-to-be-forgotten decade.
The best thing that happened, if you ask me, is that young adult literature exploded. You can walk into almost any Barnes and Noble now and find a whole section devoted to YA fiction.
I don’t imagine I’ll be able to write this all in one sitting, so I’m just going to start at the beginning, which for me was Gossip Girl.
It was 2003, I think, when I was working at a small daily paper in southern Connecticut, that an editor dropped a stack of Gossip Girl novels on my desk. I worked for the city desk, meaning I mostly wrote obits and covered breaking news stories about important happenings, like the local post office getting its own little postal ATM.
But Jim, the amazing and wonderful features editor, knew I had better things to do with my time. Like read Cecily von Ziegesar’s highly addictive and seriously trashy novels about wealthy teenaged girls on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Cecily, when I met her, took umbrage at my calling her books “trashy.” But I meant it in a good way. What she wrote wasn’t saccharine sweet, like the Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club books I had grown up reading. No, Cecily ventured into dangerous territory. She wrote about booze and drugs and sex and fashion and the general cattiness of New York’s upper crust.
Looking back now, and seeing all the amazing teen literature that came both before and after Gossip Girl, it’s easy to trash the series. Cecily’s characters had few redeeming qualities, and her plots were designed to fill her readers with envy.
But isn’t that what your teen years are really all about? I don’t know about you, but I spent my teens being uncomfortable with my body, with my social standing, with my clothes, with my interests. I was uncomfortable around boys, and I was even more uncomfortable around girls. If anyone knew I’d gotten my new sweater at a discount store instead of at Nordstrom, I was sure I’d become an instant pariah.
Right. So the thing that amazed me about Gossip Girl is that, as a series, it hit readers right where it hurt the most. Those of us who devoured the novels were excited because they were racy and fun and because they lacked the kind of moralizing we’d come to expect.
For me, Gossip Girl was the start of something new in young adult fiction. Instead of being preachy and condescending, authors and publishers were finally starting to understand that teenagers are … you know … people. With brains. Instead of pretending that no teenager ever smoked a joint (unless he or she was a “bad seed”), Gossip Girl acknowledged it and moved on. It’s hard to believe now that, when the books first became popular, there were tons of articles published questioning whether all that exposure to sex, drugs and rock and roll would corrupt teenagers.
I’m not saying it was all good, Gossip Girl. For one thing, the concept for the series was developed by a book packager — although it was Cecily’s concept, as she worked for the company.
For awhile, toward the end of the 2000s, I was very bitter toward book packagers because I thought the idea of a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a table and deciding what teenagers would like was, you know, ludicrous. But let’s face it: lots of writers, including Cecily, get their start by writing for these companies. And they’ve always existed, these men in suits and struggling young writers. As much as it’s tempting to idolize authors as unique snowflakes whose creativity is akin to godliness, it turns out the publishing industry isn’t quite that simple.
Lots of brilliant folks, like Scott Westerfeld and Libba Bray, got their starts writing for book packagers. And now they’re off doing their own awesome, wacky, super-smart projects.
Ahem. I believe I may have gone off on a tangent. The point here is that regardless of how many puppet-masters there were behind the scenes, Gossip Girl broke new ground for writers and readers of teen lit. And, you know. It was also an incredibly popular book series that spawned any number of spinoffs and knockoffs, got its own TV series, and provided tons of brain candy for those of us who dared to indulge.
With that, I’ll leave you for today. But I’ll be back soon, with more about literature of the ’00s.
Much love,
brina
Tags: alloy, cecily von ziegesar, gossip girl, the 2000s