Persuasion Author Martina Boone on Southern Gothics and Strong Women in YA

Deeply flawed and eccentric characters are one of the hallmarks of Southern Gothic literature. That’s one of the things I love the most about the genre. If there’s a sorority girl, she’s more likely to turn out to be a serial killer who hides the left toes of her victims in her velvet-lined jewelry box.
But that’s a bit of a problem when it comes to YA literature. Or maybe the expectations for teen girls in general. The call for “strong heroines” or “empowered girls” in fiction seems to have resulted in the expectation that girls can’t make mistakes, that they aren’t scared, or angry, or lashing out, or distrustful. Or deceitful.
The beautiful, decaying Southern settings of novels in this genre are characters in their own right, built on atmospheric description that brings them to vivid life, but they’re also mirrors for the fraying psyches of the people who reside within them. Southern Gothic settings often seem to cling to propriety and an outdated gentility, while hiding deep and dangerous secrets the same way the characters cloak grotesque and horrific behavior beneath smiling charm.
That element of horror and its encompassing darkness is often the point of Southern Gothic literature. The situations within the pages of these books are rooted in crime or violence that stems from feelings of poverty, alienation, or social injustice that are remnants of a war that tore the country and especially the South apart. Sometimes those feelings push people into dabbling in the supernatural, or sometimes the supernatural is just there, pushing the story into something bigger than “real life.”

My favorite Southern Gothics are crosses between psychological studies, family dramas, and magical realism. Magic and the supernatural are part of the fabric of so many of the stories. But it’s a real magic. Often, it’s not explained. Everyone accepts it. And it shoves characters out of their safe and expected molds and makes them larger than life.
Surviving that kind of story isn’t pretty. If you’re a teen girl, you’re going to screw it up now and then, especially when it comes to falling in love for the first time while simultaneously dealing with complicating factors. You’re going to argue, lie, or hide the truth from yourself, or make the wrong decisions. You’re going to barrel into situations you don’t understand and make them worse.It’s going to be messy.
And here’s the thing. LIFE is messy. I wrote the character in my Southern Gothic for my daughter, who has a learning disability that both drove her crazy and ultimately made her strong. (It’s no coincidence that one of the characters in the book struggles with a learning disability that makes him prickly about being considered stupid!)
It troubles me that strength seems to equal perfection in today’s world. Who came up with that delusion? Strength comes from being imperfect as a teen. Whether you’re a teen in a book with fantasy elements, or in a contemporary book, you need to have a learning curve and the opportunity to grow.
The characters in Southern Gothics aren’t always easy to love, but they reflect some part of real life. They have families, complicated relationships, devils that sit on their shoulders and whisper of insecurities and illicit desires. They fight what’s good for them. They fight with each other. They strain and train our empathy and make us think.
Empathy. That’s the key. It’s not something I often see discussed with respect to Southern Gothics, and perhaps it’s because there aren’t many true Southern Gothics for young adults. Reading stretches empathy by letting us slip into the lives of people different than we are and seeing the problems they experience and the hardships they face. The more we invest as readers, I would argue, the more we grow as people.
The characters in Southern Gothics are growing. They’re giving us opportunities for empathy. They’re giving us deep flaws that reflect, amplify, and let us understand our own. They’re weird. And the authors show why they’re still worth loving. Or hating. Or both.
That’s why I wanted to write a Southern Gothic. Sure, in the Heirs of Watson Islands series I mix it with mystery, adventure, fantasy, history, and a really hefty dose of romance. Still, the things I love about the genre are all in Compulsion, Persuasion, and forthcoming Illusion: flawed characters, a grand but crumbling plantation setting, explorations of gender roles and the legacy of slavery, the way that history changes according to who tells the story.
Boone’s Southern Gothic YA picks:
Compulsion, by Martina Boone
Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, by Michelle Hodkin
The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater
Persuasion, book two in Martina Boone’s Heirs of Watson Island series, is out today!