We All Looked Up Author Tommy Wallach Asks: What Is YA?

I never meant to write YA. The first book I wrote was a funny science-fiction novel about sending all of the ugly people on Earth away to another planet. It was modeled on Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book that has never been categorized as YA, even if most readers discover it during their teenage years. (Side note: It continues to be great, and you should buy it.) After that, I wrote four literary novels, aimed squarely at the beefy, overdeveloped brains of pretentious adults—the kind who read Nabokov and Proust and Mann, who sip white wine at parties and say things like “jejune” and “recherché” and “badminton injury.” I’m still proud of parts of these books, but none of them truly worked. They were all practice, as it turned out.
It was ten years after I finished my first novel that I had the idea for a book about four kids dealing with their possible extinction in the face of an incoming asteroid. It was inspired by a very adult movie (Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which is also great), but I knew it was a YA story. I sketched out the protagonists and outlined the plot in a matter of hours. The first draft was done a few months later. It’s called We All Looked Up, and it comes out this very week.
That means I am now a YA writer. Which is funny, because I’ve never really understood the term. I mean, I know it stands for young adult, but that’s not saying very much. Technically, everybody is a young adult. For example:

By all logical metrics, this baby is a very young adult. He is undoubtedly more mature than some of the adults I know, in addition to being much, much cuter. But books specifically tailored for babies such as this one are not called “YA.” They are called “Picture Books.” “Middle Grade” books skew older, aimed at kids who look like this:

When a child has walked beyond the valley of the shadow of picture books and crossed the soft and snowy mountains of Middle Grade, she reaches the glorious prairie known as Young Adult. It’s a vast and spacious prairie, made up of thrillers and horrors and mysteries and fantasies and science-fictions, and yes, even some little houses. In fact, the YA prairie is so wide and so clement and so much damn fun that some children never leave it. They start reading YA books and they never stop, not even when they have little chubby young adults of their own. An oft-cited research study from 2012 showed that 55% of YA book consumers were over 18. The Denver Public Library system says that around 70% of its YA check-outs come from readers over the age of 18.
In other words, the term YA can’t be said to define the readership of YA books. So then, what does it define?
Well, it would help to know what an adult is. “A person who is fully grown or developed,” says my dictionary. But if that’s true, if “adult” is an absolute word like “unique” (grammatical pet peeve: it makes no sense to say something is “very unique,” because something is either one of a kind or it isn’t), then “young adult” becomes a meaningless oxymoron. You’re either young or you’re an adult. You can’t be both. Thanks a lot, dictionary.
When I think of the term “Young Adult,” the first thing that comes to mind is the language my mom would use when I was in trouble as a kid. I’m sure you remember it; every parent uses it the same way:
“Young man, did you just set that girl’s shoelaces on fire?”
“Where do you think you’re going wearing nothing but Saran Wrap and a halter top, young lady?”
“Young man, are you selling whiskey on the school bus? And did you cut that whiskey with tap water you dyed brown in order to increase your profit margin?”
In the Supreme Court of Parental Judgment, children are always tried as young adults. That’s because, while children can get away with almost anything, adults are expected to know better. I think this is the key to understanding what Young Adult has come to mean as a literary term. It describes books for those who are now old enough to know better. To read better and thus to think better. Maybe even to act better.
So for me, YA isn’t a definition. It’s an aspiration. As the great sage Aaliyah once sang, “Age ain’t nothin’ but a number.” YA books are about becoming an adult, even if, technically, the reader already is one.
Tommy Wallach’s We All Looked Up hits shelves tomorrow.