I’ve actually been hesitating and starting and hesitating on writing this post for weeks.  I felt like it was a little too…much.  A little too dark and a little too personal.  But then I read this post by the fabulous Joey Nichols over at Totally4ya.com where I blog once a month.  And I thought, ‘if she can share that, then I guess I can share this.  It isn’t of the same nature, but it is very personal.  And I am the type of person who balks at all things personal.

I’ve given some thought to why I write YA and there are two answers to that question.  The reason I started writing YA, which is for a different post, and the reason I continue to write it at the expense of all the adult novels that I used to write.  But I never had a definitive answer really formed out in my brain until I had an epiphany the other day.

I was listening to the radio and the early 90′s song, Runaway Train by Soul Asylum came on the radio.   I suspect that the majority of younger readers have never even heard of this song, let alone actually heard it.  But when I was in high school this was something of an anthem for me.  Along with the song Unforgiven by Metallic.  I felt this song, deeply.  Up until the moment that I went to youtube just now to get this video I had no clue this song is really about troubled youth, but at the time I felt this song was written just for me.

Here are the lyrics for those who have trouble understanding what they’re saying.  And this story is going somewhere writing related, I swear.

Call you up in the middle of the night

Like a firefly without a light

You were there like a slow torch burning

I was a key that could use a little turning

So tired that I couldn’t even sleep

So many secrets I couldn’t keep

Promised myself I wouldn’t weep

One more promise I couldn’t keep

It seems no one can help me now

I’m in too deep

There’s no way out

This time I have really led myself astray

CHORUS

Runaway train never going back

Wrong way on a one way track

Seems like I should be getting somewhere

Somehow I’m neither here no there

Can you help me remember how to smile

Make it somehow all seem worthwhile

How on earth did I get so jaded

Life’s mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go

I know what no one else knows

Here I am just drownin’ in the rain

With a ticket for a runaway train

Everything is cut and dry

Day and night, earth and sky

Somehow I just don’t believe it

CHORUS

Bought a ticket for a runaway train

Like a madman laughin’ at the rain

Little out of touch, little insane

Just easier than dealing with the pain

Runaway train never comin’ back

Runaway train tearin’ up the track

Runaway train burnin’ in my veins

Runaway but it always seems the same

When I heard this song the other day, teenagehood twenty years gone, driving my kids around in my minivan, it took me right back there as though it was happening now.  I’m neither ignorant nor arrogant enough to believe I had the worst childhood ever, but things were not good.

When I was young I was the dreaded poor kid.  Incredibly poor, like on the door of homelessness poor.  We lived in a trailer that frequently didn’t have electricity or running water.  We never had a phone.  All of my food came from free lunches at school or whatever my parents got from the commodities place next to the homeless shelter in downtown Albuquerque.  There were many days we just didn’t eat.  But I learned early that books at the library were free.  And there was an escape in those books that was better than anything I could manufacture on my own.  And no one cared that I was there.  No one noticed me at all if I sat in the corner and read quietly.  And I didn’t notice that I was hungry and depressed and lonely if I was there.

Like many people living in abject poverty, there were serious issues at home.  It isn’t like people who are capable of controlling their actions typically end up in situations like that.  My parents were, themselves, runaway trains, headed through the darkness of their own endless tunnels.  My mother was too busy with her own demons to stop people taking their demons out on us children.    At the time I thought she wasn’t a great mother, or a great person.  (who doesn’t feel that way about their mothers sometimes)  But as an adult, looking back, I realized she just didn’t have any better tools to deal with life.  She did the best she could.

But growing up that way makes marks on you.  Marks that by teenagehood had directed me down an unfortunate path.  I was anorexic.  I frequently considered suicide.  I was so tired.  I felt, sometimes, like I could never make it through another day.  I was a cutter before cutting was something people talked about.  I was long into adulthood before I realized there were other people who did what I did, with crisscrosses of scars up and down their arms.  Reality was way too hard to bear.

So instead, whenever I could, I lived in world’s either of my making or of other authors making.  It was an escape that literally saved my sanity.  And it is, perhaps, not totally overdramatic to say that books saved my life.  In books not only could I be somewhere else but I could be anything but myself and that was what I desperately needed.  But it wasn’t just an escape.  Books are how I learned that there was another life out there.  That there were parents and children who related in ways that made sense or that were even healthy.  There were husbands and wives who loved each other.  There were worlds that contained logic and order and not a constant sense of spinning out of control.  It helped me to realize that somewhere, sometime, things would be different.  I didn’t have to live that life forever.

Someday there would be a different life out there and sometimes I could see it in between the pages of a book.

I want everyone to like my books.  I want everyone to pick them up and appreciate what they find between the pages.  But the truth is, I do this for the kids like me.  The people who need to escape.  The ones who never see anything beautiful unless it’s in between the pages of a novel.  The ones who have no other escape but huddled in the corner at the library hoping no one notices them and tells them they aren’t allowed to be there.  For the people who feel lost and lonely and out of control.  In hopes that I can give them the hope that other authors gave to me.  That there’s magic in the world.  That there’s order.  That some day you will be in control of you.

I used to write books for adults, and that was fine.  An adult needs to escape now and then from a hectic life of every day monotony and chores.  But they can walk away from almost any situation if it gets too bad.  There’s no trap like the trap of a child stuck in a situation out of their control.  The world is too big and no matter what you’re always too small.  I want to be the person who gives control back.

If you’re the one, like me, huddled on your bed in your trailer with all the glass knocked out of the windows, listening to people scream in the other room, making it all go away with a cheap flashlight and world of magic, I want to reach you.

I want to make you understand that some day you’ll be in control.  You’ll be in charge.  You can make your own magic.  Until then, I hope you’ll let me help you the way other authors helped me.  I hope that books can save other people they way they saved me.

And I hope this isn’t painfully personal or awkward for the people I’m not specifically talking to right now.  Because I love the idea of everyone enjoying my books.  But the reason I write YA now instead of what I wrote before is this very thing.  Sanity and promise of a better life.  I hope everyone can experience loving a book that way even once in their life.

AMBER