Young Adult Fiction: Sanctuary

My father might be reading this at this very moment. Don't think I haven't thought about that.
I write anyway, the 'truest sentence' I know. My father hurt us. He hurt me, but more terribly ( I tell myself ) my mother and my baby sister. He hurt her so badly, I have not heard from her in 6 years. Thinking of what he did to her, and the results of those actions, fills me with a molasses, so thick and so rancid I make to drown in it. Like a raccoon on a miserable Mississippi summer's breath. This molasses is kept in the basement. This basement is where my blood tills. Where Bluebeard keeps his butchered women. These kind of images slide through my mind when I address my childhood. Father/Bluebeard I have a poem there. This basement is where many (not all, no) of my poems come from. I dreg the floorboards and leech them of their sick. Animals know enough to sick up what poisons them. I can do this as well.

The literature I read as a young girl saved my life. I have written an entire blog about that truth.
What saved me was no one novel and no one type of novel. Anne and her pollyanna charms spoke to me as clearly as Sylvia and her bell jar. But the bell jar- it reflected what was, not what I hoped for or dreamed of. I knew about the bell jar. And to find protagonists who spoke the Dark Arts, who understood this language- this was inclusive. This is the opposite of lonliness. Lonliness is what ugly suffering brings you. Who wants to be a part of that?

Acceptable Misery would have been arguing, fighting parents
Lonely misery was my father's fist through the glass windshield of our car

Acceptable Misery would have been being broke
Lonely misery was living one whole year in a studio motel room by the beach

Acceptable Misery would have been mean parents
Lonely misery was molest, nightmares of parents murdering you

How do you feel reading this? Uncomfortable? Unsure if it's worth it to read the story? Where it might go?

To live it. To live it. This is not explainable or transferable but it is a large stone I mouth with my tongue and push round my teeth until every single one is chipped in my efforts with half a tongue to Speak It. ( to me this IS being a writer )

The Young Adult novels that dared to breach darkness saved my soul. They told me you are not alone, a freak, an alien, a miserable mistake to be eradicated. Someone wrote this story:
















and I read it. I read it again. And again, and again. During the reading, I understood some essential points to surviving my childhood with my soul intact: you can suffer deeply and greatly but you are not alone. And you can suffer deeply and greatly but you can make it out alive.
The darkness of this particular novel above, described here as:

“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” is an autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, written under the pen name of Hannah Green in 1964. It is the fictionalized story of her own hospitalization and treatment for so called “schizophrenia”. She describes her powerful struggle for recovery and shows that by finding sense in her psychotic experiences, she found a way back to a happy and self-determined life.

was a darkness that spoke to me in plain, gutteral and clear language. It was honest. It did not make things that were black into grey. What is dark is DARK. It cannot be made light by mincing words or sarcasm or jovial dismissal or even by lots of drinking and drugs and sex.

























Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson, told a more subtle but achingly, absolutely achingly poignant story of a painful coming of age story, about a girl living on an island growing up in the shadow of her more beautiful, intelligent and loved sister, who at birth took center stage, and never stopped. The book is like the moors: still, quiet waters that run deep. The pain of the protagonist is so sharp and genuine. I literally have read this novel 30 or more times, and I still have the same copy I had at 15, which sits now on Lola's bookshelf. This book spoke to my isolation.

























My beloved (almost above all others in YA) Anne of Green Gables series wraps up in this incredibly wonderful novel Rainbow Valley. Montgomery was brave in allowing the story line of Anne naturally evolve with her age and circumstance, growing much more serious in this novel taking place during the war, and revolving around a 'Rilla', Anne's almost grown daughter, who in an attempt to be more serious during serious times adopts a baby from a desperately poor and ill family who has no one to take care of it. Anne's son struggles greatly with his fear of suffering until finally he is shipped of the war, and killed. The novel is so tremendously skilled- her writing may be aimed at YA but the careful and most intelligent and deeply felt touch of her writing is to be appreciated by all ages.

I know that as a child, I read this book over and over and over out of the series, because the pain resonated with me.

There were so many Young Adult novels in the eighties that spoke of the reality of less than perfect childhoods, and many that also spoke of the darkness that childhood can take on when your caretakers fail. I could read these books and find a door to a room with other children like myself, confused, afraid, hurting, but desperately wanting to feel that there was a way out, a door beyond the door ( like the Wrinkle In Time ) where we could escape.