It’s Not Fair: A Guest Post by Jennifer Graham

After being accused of murdering her boyfriend and best friend, a Texas teen is desperate to clear her name in this twisted ride through the rumor mill. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Jennifer Graham on writing Our Monthly Pick, The Fall of Iris Henley.

Writing a YA mystery is always, at least in part, an act of picking an old wound.

Adolescence at its best is rife with injustice. You’re expected to act like an adult without any of the perks of being one. There are rules that don’t make sense and petty institutional cruelties to face every day. The adults around you treat you with a mixture of authoritarianism and exasperation, and even when well-meaning, they never really get what you’re going through. Meanwhile, among your peers there’s another set of arbitrary rules and expectations, many of which are invisible or situationally specific—and if you mess those up, you might just find yourself an outcast.

Add to that baseline unfairness an actual crime, and suddenly you’re plunged into a perfect microcosm to examine questions of right and wrong, loyalty and betrayal, cruelty and kindness.

(This is part of what obsessed me about Veronica Mars. High school is already a seedy underbelly; layering a hard-boiled detective story over that setting makes for great TV.)

The initial idea for The Fall of Iris Henley (“What if you were anonymously accused of murder, and people started to believe it?”) came from a handful of prominent cyber-harassment and -stalking cases I’ve seen in the true crime ecosystem over the last decade. The anonymity of the internet makes it fertile ground for deception. There are obviously a handful of sociopaths out there making good use of that anonymity—but the scariest part, for me, are the otherwise “normal” people you sometimes read about. The friend, the sibling, even the parent, whose worst and ugliest instincts are stoked by the ability to post and comment and spy and lie under the cover of the internet.

In the process of writing, the story began to intersect with the smaller-scale (but sometimes equally traumatizing) injustices of being a teenager. Parents that are status-obsessed or controlling or even abusive; coaches that drive you past your limits, not for your own good but in order to win; peers that assume things about you based on your clothes or your car or your grades. A town that has a certain idea of how people should be, and creates no space for them to be any other way. It’s not fair. Every teenager knows this, even when they’re a part of the problem; they know in their gut that it’s not fair.

And what is the response they get from grown-ups when they complain about it? Life’s not fair. Get used to it.

No wonder so many of us return to the setting to write mysteries. If life’s not fair, how on earth do you keep yourself safe? How do you survive?

Do you accept that unfairness? Or do you fight it with everything you’ve got?