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8 Books That Don’t Sugarcoat Teen Sexuality

These writers don’t idealize puberty and the sometimes scary years that follow.
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In a recent installment of HuffPost’s Love + Sex podcast, co-hosts Noah Michelson and Carina Kolodny talked about the increasing number of teens turning to literature to educate themselves about sex.

It's not a surprising trend, especially considering that only 22 states require sexual education at all, and some districts still promote abstinence-only programs. Of course, it's not the responsibility of novelists to educate teens about protection, STDs and other important issues. But a well-told story from a teen's perspective can show what sex can be like when it's good, what sex can be like when it's not so good. It can remind young readers that being a sexual being is totally normal and worth celebrating. 

Which is why it's surprising that few realistic YA writers tackle the subject of sex head-on -- John Green's moralistic and enjoyable novels lightly brush over the topic. Sure, there are fantasy books with sexually active characters. But, frankly, "Twilight" makes sex seem like a harbinger of doom. 

Thankfully, the tides are changing, both in and out of the YA genre. YA writers like David Levithan are working to remind young readers that gender is a social construct; literary fiction writers like Danielle Evans give a voice to young black girls experimenting with sex for the first time. 

We collected a few of our favorite books that make teen sex a very real experience worth talking about. Though they all offer something different to the canon of young voices, they're united by the fact that they don't talk down to their readers -- many of whom are presumably teens. 

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

Abbott specializes in writing about teenagehood as an experience too strange and surreal to be discussed straightforwardly, let alone idealized, as it so often is. But, she's not exactly employing vampires and werewolves as metaphors for how weird sexual exploration can be. Her latest novel, The Fever, is based on the true story of a town full of young women who are inexplicably plagued with seizures. But an earlier book of hers explores the bodily experience of growing up more subtly. In The End of Everything, two inseparable girls are separated when one of them mysteriously disappears. On her search for her friend, Lizzie learns about how fulfilling -- and how damaging -- sexual attention can be.

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

Hunter’s first book is a doozy, by which I mean it perfectly mimics the sensory and emotional-overload that is contemporary teenagehood. Frenemies Perry and Baby Girl are pretty different, aside from their shared interest in driving around and stirring up mostly innocuous trouble -- petty theft is their go-to time-killer. But when they both pursue increasingly heated flirtation with a mysterious Facebook friend, their warring approaches to dealing with their budding sexualities is brought to attention. The result is a very real examination of female friendship, and the ways women must fight to feel socially valuable.

Read our review of Ugly Girls.

 

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Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty

McCafferty’s first book launched a series chronicling the fraught relationship between lovesick heroine Jessica Darling (called “Notso,” as in “not so Darling” by her goofy dad) and the object of her obsession, Marcus Flutie. Marcus is a proto-manic pixie dream boy, in that he’s not much greater than the sum of his quirks. Which, if you think about it, is the perfect way to characterize a first crush. More importantly, McCafferty’s story is a fun addition to the unfortunately slim collection of books out there about girls who are governed by their sex drives -- Jess might meditate on her favorite '80s songs or her own poor choice in friends, but more than anything she thinks about getting laid, making sex less shameful for young girls everywhere.

Listen to our podcast installment with McCafferty.

Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

Islam's debut novel features a diverse cast -- a Bangladeshi girl who's more at home in nature than in social settings, her bubbly cousin and her cousin's runaway friend. Each girl has repressed secrets, and each deals with sexual awakenings differently. Protagonist Ella is traumatized after the death of her parents, and her PTSD is salved -- at least somewhat -- by her explorations with another girl. And the book's about more than emotional journeys: it's set in both Brooklyn and Bangladesh, where the family explores its own distant and not-so-distant past.

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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans

Although most of her narrators are teens, Evans’ debut short story collection isn’t categorized as YA. There’s a critical distinction to be made, here: her stories are gritty rather than fable-like, and so they fit more comfortably into the literary fiction genre, at least marketing-wise. In the collection’s first and arguably most powerful story, “Virgins,” a couple of dissimilar and inseparable friends help each other across the battlefield of almost-womanhood. They try on new personas while seeking out guys at a club, and the narrator sagely observes, “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.” Each story reads like a too-true diary entry about what it’s like to be young and black in America. 

Another Day by David Levithan

In his follow-up to One Day, a book about a narrator who wakes up each day in a different body, Levithan tells the story of Rhiannon, the love interest of body-swapping A. This isn’t the only book in which Levithan branches out from heteronormative sex-ed tropes, but it might be the author’s edgiest work so far. “I wanted to ask the questions that are relevant to gender -- about how much is a construction and how much is inherent,” Levithan said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Preach.

Read our review of Another Day.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

In Faulkner-like fashion, Gaitskill’s latest novel is narrated by a cast of characters, including a woman coping with the trauma of lost loved ones, her critical husband, and the preteen girl they choose to sponsor, first for a brief summer trip, and later by offering emotional support over the phone and on subsequent visits. The girl, Velvet, is a Dominican student going through puberty, and learning through her older friends how elating male attention can be. This knowledge distracts her from her studies -- and eventually teaches her about the value of independence.

Read our review of The Mare.

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner

You might’ve known that this year’s praised film about budding teen artist Minnie’s sexual awakening is based on a graphic novel. If you’ve seen the movie, you probably also know that actress Bel Powley’s simultaneously sweet and sinister look purely incapsulates the way we sexualize youth, and the ways powerful young women react to that sexualization. Powley, along with director Marielle Heller, bring these themes to life visually, but in Gloeckner’s original story, there are a lot more details about Minnie’s confusion and isolation. It’s a worthy read regardless of whether or not you dug the movie.

 

 

 

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The Best Books Of 2015
(01 of13)
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Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson "Even the title of T. Geronimo Johnsonâs second novel, Welcome to Braggsville, drips with morbid humor. Who, exactly, is welcome in the small Southern town of Braggsville, Georgia? At first, at least in the eyes of innocent college freshman Daron Davenport, everyone is equally welcome -- until he has cause to question that equality. In acute, tragicomic fashion, Johnson turns this tale of a misbegotten college student protest of a Civil War reenactment into a subtle exploration of identity, personal narrative, collective narrative, racism, academic elitism and far more [....] Braggsville deftly pokes and prods at the innumerable dark corners of American racial conflict and identity politics, not content to let self-satisfied lefties or placidly 'coexisting' Southerners sit easily with their part in ongoing injustice. Blame lies nowhere and everywhere, and he pulls it all out with a sharp eye and wit that lets nothing escape." -Claire, from our review of Welcome to Braggsville (credit:William Morrow)
(02 of13)
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Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont "What would you do if your husband, the father of your children, carried on a months-long affair with a younger woman? What would you do if the woman wrote to you, sending you a box full of explicit texts and chat transcripts detailing the things her husband had wanted to do to her? What would you do if your children found the box and read everything? In Julia Pierpontâs poignant debut novel, every choice made after this moment further fractures a broken familyâs future into seemingly infinite possible paths. The husband, Jack, has promised his wife, Deb, heâd end a fling with a much younger girl. The arrival of the box, and its discovery by confused Kay, 11, and furious Simon, 15, blows up the coupleâs tenuous truce and sets the family spinning. In the crucial weeks that follow, the familyâs fate hangs in the balance; even the smallest decisions have the potential to define the outcome." -Claire, from our review of Among the Ten Thousand Things (credit:Random House)
(03 of13)
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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara "Emotionally harrowing yet full of rather implausible sources of comfort, A Little Life somehow throws readers between the most unlikely extremes of horror and joy that life holds, making for a compulsively readable if artistically flawed sophomore effort. At the center of A Little Life, which follows four tight-knit college friends from their mid-twenties to their fifties, is Jude St. Francis, a reserved, enigmatic genius. Judeâs intelligence, generosity and quiet charisma keeps his friends close, even as he remains inaccessible to them; he has never told them about his childhood or how he acquired the severe leg injuries that increasingly limit his mobility as he grows older. Willem, J.B., and Malcolm, the people closest to him, protect him by allowing him to hide himself, even as they wonder if they should [....] It can be deeply exhausting to read, over and over again, such unvarnished negativity, and to see a character we grow to care for mired in self-hatred. Bluntly, repeatedly, we hear of Judeâs relapses into self-harm and read his chorus of hateful inner voices. But this granular portrayal of depression and, eventually, grief, is the greatest strength of the novel." -Claire, from our review of A Little Life (credit:Doubleday)
(04 of13)
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The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer "Language is the warp and weft of a novel, but in Aatish Taseer's new novel, The Way Things Were, it's more than the material: It's a character. It may even be the hero. It's certainly, at the very least, the love interest. [...] The book follows Skanda, a student of Sanskrit, in the year after his father's death. As his mother, Uma, and his father, Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, have been long divorced after a passionate but brief marriage, Skanda must return to India to take care of the funeral arrangements. Toby, a renowned Sanskritist, imbued Skanda with his all-consuming love for the language, a romance that became the central one of Toby's life.[...] This taste of the wonders of what has been called the most perfect language doesn't exist in an ivory tower, however. As he continues his Sanskrit studies, Skanda must reckon with India's recent troubled history, his own parent's fractious marriage and the unacknowledged effects on his own childhood, and the inextricable complicity of the language he loves." -Claire, from our interview with Aatish Taseer (credit:FSG)
(05 of13)
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A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor â'These words are his cremation,' says the woman narrator of A Bad Character, of the boyfriend weâve learned is dead in the first line of the novel. Deepti Kapoorâs debut novel smolders with the submerged rage, pain, abandonment and erotic desire that drive her heroine, Idha; itâs a paean to a relationship already in ashes, and to a beloved now gone beyond recovery[....] "The great strength and vitality of Kapoorâs novel lies in the episodic, mercurial narration; her writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem, flitting lightly from scene to scene to scene in a matter of sentences. This artful rendering of her narratorâs psyche allows her to make striking juxtapositions that gracefully elicit her recurrent motifs and underlying themes. If the book ever lags, itâs when these vignettes seem to slip into long strands of narrative or extensive exposition, as Kapoorâs blunt, searing language is at its most compelling in these brief, scattered glimpses." -Claire, from our review of A Bad Character (credit:Knopf)
(06 of13)
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Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum "Anna Benz, the American wife of a Swiss banker named Bruno, has lived in Switzerland with her husband for nearly a decade, but remains ambivalently on the outskirts of society. She has made no real friends and can barely speak a word of Schwiizerdütsch, the local tongue. Instead, she stays home and raises their three children, Victor, Charles, and Polly, with grudging help from her mother-in-law, Ursula. Unsurprisingly, Anna feels stagnant and trapped; sheâs moody, depressed and difficult. [...] Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary and a poetâs fascination with language. Anna constantly interrogates her own word choices -- is what sheâs doing good? Can she say itâs âgoodâ when she means mostly that itâs âallowableâ or âconvenientâ? What is the difference between wanting something and needing something? -- and what her word choices reveal about her motivations, her desires, and the self she instinctively tries to spin into something more admirable." -Claire, from our review of Hausfrau (credit:Random House)
(07 of13)
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The Sellout by Paul Beatty "The Sellout is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs. [...] Beatty is at his best when parodying attempts to correct racial prejudices from within the ivory tower. In the lyrical prologue, Beattyâs protagonist turns a snarky, discerning eye toward Washington, D.C., observing that the city is supposed to look like ancient Rome, 'that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses and cherry blossoms.' Heâs waiting for his case -- 'Me v. the United States of America' -- to be heard by the Supreme Court. When standing before the jury, ready to outline the complex injustices committed against him over the course of his lifetime, he wonders why thereâs no legal gray area between 'innocent' and 'guilty.' He thinks, 'Why couldnât I be âneitherâ or âbothâ?'" -Maddie, from our review of The Sellout (credit:FSG)
(08 of13)
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Book of Aron by Jim Shepard "Shepardâs gift for drawing out the most elemental, human narratives against a backdrop of tremendous scale reaches its apex in The Book of Aron, a haunting novel told from the perspective of a young boy struggling to survive in the Warsaw ghetto in the final, grim years of Nazi power." -Claire, from our interview with Jim Shepard (credit:Knopf)
(09 of13)
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Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser "The towns in Steven Millhauserâs stories are haunted. The characters -- nearly all of them -- are frenzied. They see phantoms, they fixate on surreal happenings, they hear voices in the night. But Millhauser isnât a horror writer; his latest collection elegantly toes the line between the real and the surreal, and many of the stories examine how we attempt to collectively explain the unexplainable. Like Fox Mulder, or even Wes Anderson, Millhauser is a delightfully playful truth-seeker who uses factual language not as a definitive descriptior, but as a jumping-off point for fuller understanding." -Maddie, from our review of Voices in the Night (credit:Knopf)
(10 of13)
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Girl playing in forest (credit:Harper)
(11 of13)
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The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson "As a poet, Maggie Nelson is concerned with the sufficiency of words -- their ability to accurately convey how we feel, and who we are. As a visual artist, her partner Harry Dodge is less convinced. So when the two met and fell in love, a life event that her new memoir, The Argonauts, centers on, Nelson began to question her allegiance to language. 'Words,' she notes, 'change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.' Most of the words she examines, positing their inadequacy along the way, are used to describe sex or gender, directly or indirectly. She's saddened by Harry's inability to publicly convey a gender-fluid identity -- born Wendy Malone, the artist has undergone a handful of name changes. Nelson's writing is fluid -- to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts. And, although some of her assertions are problematic, she masterfully analyzes the way we talk about sex and gender." -Maddie, from our review of The Argonauts (credit:Graywolf)
(12 of13)
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The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits "Heidi Julavits felt trapped. While vacationing in Germany with a friend, she reluctantly set out on a drive up a narrow, icy road. The further they travelled, the steeper and riskier the climb became. Terrified by her inability to change course -- the road had shrunken to the narrow width of the car -- she panicked. The potentials of the day had suddenly been reduced to a binary fate: theyâd make it to their destination, or they wouldnât. As soon as she was able to turn around, thanks to a widening near a tunnel, she did. In her new book, The Folded Clock: A Diary, she likens this incident to the experience of novel writing, an act she finds suffocating When asked why she wanted to write a plotless story -- a diary -- Julavits said it felt true to how we live. 'I do feel like we move through space and information differently now,' she said. 'We do it every day. Youâre linking. Thereâs a link. Everything has a link. Thereâs a link buried in whatever youâve read. Things suddenly go off in these unexpected zig-zags through virtual spaces, which are kind of story spaces that you create for yourself as you navigate. Thereâs no plot to that. There is a type of linkage, but itâs a different type of linkage. Thatâs what I was trying to capture, or come to terms with.'â -Maddie, from These Are My Confessions: What Diary-Keeping Means In An Age Of Oversharing (credit:Doubleday)
(13 of13)
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The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro "Set in Arthurian Britain circa 500 A.D. -- a historical period we know little about -- it follows an old married couple that hopes to restore their lost memories, as they and their neighbors seem to be suffering from a collective amnesia. Axl and Beatrice are granted permission to leave their town, and early on in their journey they encounter bloodthirsty pixies, a once-fierce dragon made weak with age, a passionate warrior who harbors a lust for vengeance, and a stubborn boatman whose route leads passengers to an Eden-like mythical land. They soon learn from a weak, old Sir Gawain (the Green Knight, that is) that the dragonâs enchanted breath is the source of their hazy thinking. Fantastical plot devices aside, Ishiguro would characterize his novel as an extended metaphor for the way social memory functions -- be it the way a nation tries to forget a war, or a married couple attempts to recall the details of their wanton first dates." -Maddie, from our interview with Kazuo Ishiguro (credit:Random House)
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