Reading Corrupted My Youth
Books are powerful, which makes them both beautifully moving and dangerous.
I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember. There’s nothing like tearing through a 350-page novel in a day and losing yourself in someone else’s life. There is much to be said about the benefits of literature, and indeed much has been said, but less discussed is the damages of reading too much. Let me first say that I love literature. There is something magical about the clarity with which fiction can expose the truth, and characters invented hundreds of years ago can put into perfect words the conditions that we feel today—reminding us across vast time and space that humans are all connected. Yet, like all things, being such an avid reader comes with costs.
Growing up, I struggled with panic attacks that caused me to avoid many social settings. I undoubtedly spent more of my childhood outside of school hours reading than I did interacting with real people. My parents were happy to encourage such a studious habit and, for the most part, gave me full reign over any books I wanted to check out from the library. I’ve always read a wide variety of genres, but gravitated most toward contemporary literary fiction, and I read a lot of popular young adult novels growing up—I would estimate around 50 books a year.
The problem, I think, comes with reading such copious amounts of fiction, which often have similar tropes, at such a vulnerable time in one’s life. Around middle school, puberty-age, one begins to discover that the world does not revolve around them, but that maybe they ought to begin to have ideas about the way the world does work. We start piecing together a worldview from adults and parents, peers, and whatever media we are consuming at the time. I didn’t have the foresight to realize it, but through reading so many books, some of the common tropes that spanned across young adult fiction would become subconscious beliefs and expectations about the world.
Often, people tout that fiction makes us more empathetic people, and I think that’s true. But I have to wonder if the hunger to be empathetic can be so overbearing that we end up mining for something to be empathetic for, finding pain where there isn’t any or worsening it, so as not to seem ‘average.’ Most of the common tropes I am referring to boil down to the romanticization of the suffering of the main character, wherein their suffering is what makes them interesting. Perhaps it’s because I willfully read books about difficult issues like abuse, assault, and mental illness, but I think at times those narratives, rather than empowering me to take steps to alleviate those types of pain, encouraged me to wallow in it for the plot.
A common plot point in novels is that a character has a traumatic past that is slowly revealed to the reader. Or romance saves the character—either from some type of abuse or from themselves—and fixes everything. Often, a main character is cold and appears emotionless until they meet “the one” who convinces them to open up or fall apart, and it creates an intimate bond. And often, novels with these tropes are fascinating and sweet; they offer a sense of hope and catharsis to the reader that even the most broken people can be healed, but when the books are targeted toward young people with little experience of the world, that catharsis can be mistaken for truth.
To state the obvious, stories are not reality. Stories are coherent; they have plot points that one can follow; even subtle character-driven narratives boast a limited cast of characters and summarize days that don’t move the plot forward. I tend to be someone who always wants to know why things happen and how things fit together in the world, and books offer that sense of reasoning and resolution. Neatly curated characters have depression for a reason—usually some event from their past—so when I battled severe bouts of depression as a youth, it was frustrating to me that there was seemingly no reason. I had no traumatic backstory. No one close to me had died. I hadn’t been bullied or assaulted. I had been taught that there should be a reason behind my despondency because that would make sense; it would serve the story. I hadn’t come to grips with the reality that life is not always so reasonable.
What further devastated me was that no one saved me, like in the books. In my deluded middle-school mind, there should have been someone there to recognize my anguish and sit in it with me. There are two problems with this—it was both unreasonable for me to expect anyone to read my mind while I was also intentionally holding them at arm's length, and unreasonable to expect, even when I did open up, that another middle schooler would be equipped to handle the immense weight of the emotions I was dealing with. Another common trope in YA fiction is that adults are often the enemy or not present at all. Some YA novels feature mentors and positive role models, but it’s far more common to focus on a young person’s coming-of-age story amidst their peers, which again plays into the romantic ideal of entrusting someone my age to deal with problems they, in reality, cannot be expected to be equipped for. Slowly, unknowingly, convincing myself to survive another hour, another day, until one day I no longer had to talk myself into living, is a much less interesting narrative.
I didn’t realize at the time that reading so many books had caused me to expect life to be a plot and people to be characters. My idealistic view of life and suffering was the crushing result of the mass consumption of books romanticizing struggle, and I am not sure there is any way around that problem in literature. Suffering must be simplified down to events and characters to be consumable at all, and without a central struggle or conflict that tends to involve suffering, there is no story. Literature, in some ways, inherently romanticizes its conflict because the suffering has been deemed worthy of being written about. Some books make languishing in mental illness or physical pain more overtly romantic than others, and books can and should be called out for doing so—no one should make trauma or depression appear desirable by mitigating those experiences and employing them solely to create a troubled character ripe for saving. Yet, I think the nature of most novels requires that challenges be romanticized, and when such challenges include subjects like mental illness, abuse, bullying, assault, etc., it’s an extremely fine line to attempt to represent those experiences authentically without having the character succumb in an almost celebrated martyrdom (the example of 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher comes to mind) or overcome those struggles in a flattened and overly simplistic conclusion wherein someone saves them, or they magically feel better over the course of a few pages.
As a writer, I empathize with the ethical challenge presented to other writers. One could argue I am guilty of it as well, having used my own history of depression as a constellation that informs many of my essays, including this one, without presenting the full breadth and difficulty of that history. But I think the issue of romanticization is particularly heavy when one’s writing is targeted toward youth. With adult novels, readers have the ability to evaluate and reject themes they do not agree with and analyze how a novel may pose unintended consequences, but children tend not to have the ability to critically analyze the long-term repercussions of the types of novels they read—at least I didn’t.
Fictional worlds are a welcome safe haven for many, and often also a truth-revealing mechanism. However, we should not mistake even the best-written novels for a reflection of reality; doing so can lead to unrealistic expectations and unsatisfied self-pity. Reading was often a wonderful way for me to feel seen growing up, and remains so, but it also corrupted my sense of what I deserve from the world. I don’t deserve to suffer a major trauma, but that doesn’t mean I am immune from reasonless suffering. I don’t deserve a savior, but that doesn’t mean I won’t survive without one. I don’t deserve to be treated like the main character in anyone else’s life, but their humanity, often irrational and ill-equipped to resolve suffering and pain, doesn’t mean I am alone.