What good art does for us

The book covers of my youth and the stories inside

As a child, I inhabited books. I got mine at the public library, which was located inside an old house with creaking wooden floors (haunted, I’m sure), my school library, Scholastic book orders, and the Waldenbooks in the Lexington Mall, where we went after lunch on Sundays. My first stop was always the bookstore; the YA section was in the back to the right.

I am grateful that no one ever censored my reading material. A librarian looked at me sideways a couple of times - like when I checked out Up the Down Staircase or the 100th time I check out the same book on transcendental meditation (I didn’t understand it but I wanted to understand it so I just kept checking it out,) but no adult ever told me what I should or shouldn’t be reading.

My mother gave me books as gifts and sometimes recommended things, but when I bought my YA paperback at Waldenbooks, no one looked to make sure it was appropriate. I read what I wanted to read. I read the books that called to me. I read the books with good cover art and interesting titles. I read books that offered worlds I wanted to escape into and characters I wanted to know.

As a young child I loved Katie John, The Borrowers, Stuart Little, A Cricket in Times Square, Harriet the Spy. I loved books about witches and witchcraft. I loved From The Mixed Up Files…I loved The Headless Cupid and all of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s books. I read every middle grades and YA book Judy Blume wrote and especially loved Blubber and Deenie.

I was a kid living in the country outside of a small town (we traveled to go to the aforementioned mall) and books allowed me a glimpse into suburban worlds where people like me could walk home from school, urban worlds where people like me rode subway trains.

When I was a pre and young teen, I read books about teenagers and new adults. I wanted to know about life - boys, sex, apartment living - all of it. In the 70s and 80s, there were a lot of books aimed at young people about alcoholism, drug use, mental illness, and teen pregnancy. Often, these books were moralistic, intended to scare young readers straight. I resented that, but I pushed the didactic stuff to the side and read for the stories, the scenarios, the scoop.

I read like my life depended on it, and it a sense, it did. I read The Outsiders, I Never Loved Your Mind, It’s Okay If You Don’t Love Me, Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones, Sooner or Later, Jeremy, Forever.

When I was an actual teenager, I no longer read YA (except for maybe Paul Zindel? I remember carrying around some Paul Zindel in high school.) But I came back to it in my 20s. I read the Weetzie Bat books for the first time as an adult, and discovered all sorts of wonderful YA books when I worked in libraries. I was an adult when I read Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May and Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons and Lois Lowry’s The Giver and fully realized that adults who didn’t read fiction written for and about young people were missing out on some of the best writing out there.

I love to read about, write about, and write for teenagers because I love teenagers and because my teenaged self is still very much alive, very much a part of me. I don’t have to reach back in time to consult with her. She’s right here.

All readers deserve good writing, enjoyable stories, characters they can be interested in, truth-telling, and beautifully designed cover art. People deserve good books. All people. People, regardless of their age, should have access to the books they want to read and time and space to read them.

Lately, I’ve been revisiting Paula Danziger, partly because of her connection to my beloved Woodstock. (I’m reading The Divorce Express right now.) I remember the Sunday I scanned the YA shelf at the Waldenbooks and slid The Cat Ate My Gymsuit off the shelf. The cover art featured a teenaged girl sitting on the floor slumped against a wall of green school lockers. I was captivated immediately.

The idea that you “shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” offended me when I was a young reader. I always judged books by their covers. The cover art of a book told me everything I needed to know. The cover was a form of divination, an expression of energy, a secret code. I looked at covers and made my decision, and this cover said YES to me. This cover said, you are my reader.

And the cover was correct. I was Paula Danziger’s reader. And I still am. Books like hers kept me alive, kept my imagination alive, moved blood through my heart. I could trust writers like Danziger because they told the truth about life.

Design trends change, book covers change. I’m grateful to have been born as a reader into a time period with human-rendered artwork on book covers - warm, detailed, sunlit 1970’s aesthetic with psychedelic influences. I’m grateful to have been born as a reader during a time of realism and boundary-pushing in storytelling. I’m grateful that the adults in my life never told me what to read but allowed me to exist in the world of books on my own, responding to the stories that called to me, fully inhabiting the worlds I read.

The characters I read when I was a young person are as real to me as people I have known in the physical world. I shared their joys and delights and their humiliations. At my most painful, most confusing times, the characters I read sat with me - not with solutions - but with honesty and compassion. They didn’t even flinch. They didn’t look away.

Because that’s what art does:

It sees us.