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Problem novels in young adult literature are often directed specifically at readers who share the problem being depicted, whether the novel's subject is "cutting" or drinking or being a child of divorce, as well as at other young people who are encouraged to feel compassion for those who are directly affected by the situation being presented. Stories about homeless and runaway teens, however, are generally not intended for teens who have already run away. Rather, they seem to be aimed at those young people who are still at home and who will read them as cautionary tales to learn from. Of course, cautionary tales are nothing new in literature for young adults. Thousands of problems novels have been published in the last century, and almost every young adult novel has a "problem" on which its plot hinges. The portrayal of these problems is usually intended to serve as a warning to young readers about the possible negative consequences of various forms of behavior. What is interesting, however, is how well stories about teenage runaways and drug addicts lend themselves to the format of an admonitory tale. Books about subjects such as drunk driving or the use of inhalants generally focus on the horrific but statistically insignificant-namely, incidents in which characters who engage in those activities experience severe negative repercussions--because of course, most teenagers who huff paint don't die, and most teens who drive after having a beer don't kill anyone. The true stories of teenage runaways are frequently so incredibly gruesome that moralistic horror stories about them are actually quite true to life. For example, in one survey of runaway and homeless youth, more than 50% of the respondents reported being shot at or stabbed. One might presume that any teenager who read one of these books would never consider running away after hearing of the true-life horrors experienced by young runaways. Given how realistic these books are, it would seem that if any type of book would have a deterrent effect on young people, it would be depictions of homeless teens. Yet that was not the case with a number of young women I spoke with. These girls had run away from home and spent time, variously, in juvenile facilities, jail, rehabilitation programs, and on the streets. In many cases, the experiences these girls had lived through were even more appalling than the ones depicted in novels, perhaps because the young women I spoke to were so brutally candid. All of these young women had read at least a few novels and memoirs about young people in trouble, and some had read dozens. When asked the neutral question, "what books did you read?" they all immediately answered with the titles of books about drug use and running away. Yet this genre of books failed to deter any of them from engaging in risky behaviors. Indeed, according to their own testimony, reading cautionary tales about high-risk teens seemed to have the opposite effect. Stella is twenty-four years old and was raised in a middle-class family in Northern California. She first ran away from home when she was fifteen, in order to be with her nineteen-year-old boyfriend. They hitchhiked to Hollywood, where they lived on the streets, begging for enough money to buy food. It was around this time that Stella started experimenting with heroin. Although she went home to her parents after 10 weeks, Stella had developed a taste for the lifestyle she had glimpsed while living with the homeless "gutter punks" in Hollywood. When she went back home she begrudgingly enrolled in a continuation high school in her hometown called "Second Chance." She admits that she didn't do her class reading; academics were not her forte. Instead she preferred to read "teenage" books about the occult, witchcraft, and vampires. She cites Anne Rice and R.L. Stein as her favorite authors of the time, and Joan Lowry Nixon's The Séance as a book that she read many times as a teenager. She liked these books because the characters were "people you could relate to, ones that were outsiders. I hated things like Sweet Valley High." By the time she graduated from "Second Chance" at the age of seventeen, she had developed a full-blown heroin addiction. With her boyfriend, she took off for the streets of San Francisco. She stayed there for more than five years, usually homeless and living on the street or in abandoned buildings, and occasionally living in SRO (single room occupancy) hotels, which are usually vermin-infested single rooms with a sink that rent by the hour, day or week. During her years on the street she was assaulted and involved in a physically abusive relationship with her boyfriend. She overdosed many times, was arrested and almost died when a squat she was staying in caught fire. She worked at a strip club and in the coffee bar of a large bookstore, but got fired from both jobs for stealing. She signed up for welfare and food stamps numerous times. She tried getting off drugs by doing a methadone detoxification program five times, and even by going home to her parents on a number of occasions. Other than during her short stint working at the bookstore, Stella admitted that she rarely read books while she was on the street. She remembered finishing The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll's coming-of-age diary about heroin addiction and life on the streets in New York City. She said she sometimes would hold a book while panhandling for change and "pretend to read" to look "smart and intelligent," but that in reality she read very little during this time other than the comics in the daily newspapers. She also recalled reading, or attempting to read, Junkie and Queer by William Burroughs. She admits that the only books that held her interest during that period in her life were books about drugs, and more specifically, books about heroin. After her last arrest two years ago and her conviction on multiple felony charges, Stella got off drugs for good by going through a long-term rehabilitation program. Stella didn't stop reading books about drugs when she got clean; they are still the literary pastime she most enjoys. "I love them," she explained. "They are the only things that suck me in and keep me reading-they are the only things I can relate to. As long as [the characters] get clean at the end. I like that." And although many of these books end in tragedy, sometimes the characters do get off drugs at the end. In the acclaimed book for young adults, Smack, Melvin Burgess weaves the tales of a group of teenagers living in squats in Bristol in the early 1980s. The main characters, Tar and Gemma, have run away from home together at the age of fourteen. Tar is fleeing his parents because they beat him, and Gemma is fleeing her parents because they bore her. Smack is intensely realistic; although it does not talk very explicitly about drugs and sex, it accurately describes the lives of teenagers living on the streets. The book charts Gemma and Tar's relationship--and soon their relationship with heroin--from a number of characters' perspectives. Not only are the descriptions of the patterns of drug use and drug users realistic, but the portrayal of the descent of two normal, middle-class teenagers into a life of prostitution, crime and addiction is both compelling and believable. Unlike many of its contemporaries, the book focuses less on the gory details of addiction and more on the development of the characters. Smack's powerful realism and strong character development have made it one of the most believable of books of its ilk. The reader is encouraged to actually care about how Gemma and Tar turn out, after watching Gemma go from a snotty but loveably naïve fourteen-year-old to a hardened eighteen-year-old prostitute, pregnant and in withdrawal from her heroin addiction, and seeing Tar be transformed from an abused but loving boy into a toughened criminal. The two characters spend much of their time convincing themselves that they could quit whenever they want. And of course, in the end, they can't. They struggle many times to get off drugs, and Tar goes through a series of detoxification and rehabilitation programs, and finally ends up on methadone maintenance , unable to stay off heroin without it. Gemma, on the other hand, kicks heroin by going to a hospital, and from there to her parents' house. She gives birth to a healthy baby girl and learns to accept that although Tar is the father of her child, at a certain point they had little in common other than heroin and were ultimately not meant to be together. Like Tar in Smack, twenty-year-old Anna is on methadone maintenance now, after failing out of a number of detoxification programs. She has been on methadone and off all other drugs for the last 2 months. Anna, who used to be actively involved in sports when she was growing up, has been doing drugs since she was thirteen and started doing heroin a few years later. She graduated early through an alternative high school program for at-risk students in her school district. She says she wasn't a very good student, but that she did do the reading for her English classes. She remembers reading Fahrenheit 451, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Catcher in the Rye, which she particularly enjoyed. "I remember having a big crush on Holden Caulfield," she said. "I wanted to have a friend like him. I was so happy when I finished that book. Usually I'm sad when I finish a book." Like Stella, Anna remembered loving books about drugs. She read Go Ask Alice the summer that she was thirteen. "What drug addict didn't read it?" she said. "I loved it! I read it in, like, two days. It had a big impact on me. I read it in between eighth and ninth grades, right before I started doing drugs." Referring to the way the characters Alice and Chris move to San Francisco and open a store, even though they are young teenagers, Anna added, "I had so much respect for the fact that they could do all that even though they were doing drugs. It made me think that maybe drugs weren't so bad." I asked her if Alice's death at the end of the book made her reconsider what the message of the book actually was. But Anna answered that she read the ending differently than the author may have intended. "I always thought she hadn't overdosed, that she had been killed--that someone had slipped something into in her drink or something," Anna explained. "It said that they weren't sure." She told me that she read Go Ask Alice "before I had any experience with anything in the book. I thought it was realistic because I had nothing to compare it too. I'd have to read it again to see if I thought it was realistic now. I think it was targeted to a younger audience and parents that wanted to be really scared. That was the first diary-teenage-troubled-youth-book I had read; before that I hadn't known about them. That's the one that got me started on reading them." Anna left home soon after finishing the alternative high school program. Her drug problem soon took hold of her life, and she lost a string of jobs in the veterinary field. She eventually ended up in San Francisco, bouncing around from SRO hotels to living in her car, staying with friends and sleeping on the streets. Unable to support her drug habit through begging and petty theft, she finally turned to prostitution. Anna has been working as a prostitute on the streets of San Francisco for more than two years. She said that though she didn't do much reading while she was on drugs, whenever she would go back to staying in hotels or with other people she would start reading again. She remembers reading The Basketball Diaries and being disappointed that there weren't enough descriptions of drug use in it. "I thought that the book was all his diaries," Anna told me. "But in the beginning it was not about his drug-related life. And at the time I was looking for a book that poured you full of drugs, and it didn't do it enough for me. And the end-it didn't tell you what happened, what he did--whether he lived or died--nothing. I had seen the movie first, so I had preconceived ideas about what it was about. I was very disappointed with the book." When I asked Anna if she only read books about drug use once she started doing drugs she said, "Like, if you are into gardening, you read things about gardening. If you are a junkie, I guess you read books about being a junkie. It was something that I could relate to, or thought I could relate to, and it gave me a perspective on other people who were doing what I was doing, or what other people who were in remotely the same situation as me were doing. "When I would look for a book, I would look for topics like drugs, prostitution, mental problems or people on the street. Or people being abused. Just troubled, fucked-up kids. I don't look for that kind of book as much anymore. I try to steer away from that kind of book now. I just read a book about World War I. I mean, it's not even than I am steering clear of them, but I am interested in other things now. I don't have the kind of tunnel vision that I had when I was younger." Unfortunately, Anna's experiences aren't extraordinary. It is estimated that among runaway and homeless youth, approximately 70% engaged in prostitution in order to meet their daily needs for food, shelter, and drugs. Sex work, in many forms ranging from stripping to street prostitution, shows up in young adult books about runaways as well. Beauty Queen by Anna Glovach tells the story of Samantha, a teenage girl who finally decides to move out of the home she shares with her alcoholic mother and lecherous step-father and ends up on her own and unable to support herself. The story is written in the form of a diary and covers a three-month period of Samantha's life. During those three months Samantha becomes a topless dancer and a heroin addict who is in love with a terrifyingly corrupt cop. She has to find places to shoot up that won't be noticeable when she is clad only in a g-string and spends a lot of time confiding in her diabetic cat. After a few months she cannot even go long enough to write a journal entry without shooting up. Although Samantha's story is told rather graphically-the details of her drug use are meticulously accurate-there is not enough character development to make the reader care when she dies at the end. The author, Anna Glovach, makes a point to emphasize her qualifications for telling this story: on the back cover of the book she is quoted as saying, "Writing the book, I saw my old dope dealer and bought $1,500 worth of pure heroin-Brown Gold-and started shooting up ten times a day to get the feel of the book. Well, I did, all right. I ended up in Glen Cove Hospital, almost dead....But I'm off it for good." One believes that Glovach is serious about her own drug use, because the lack of comprehension Samantha shows about her own feelings and the motivations behind her use of heroin is often characteristic of addicts. However, that absence of emotional resonance doesn't lend itself well to a young adult novel where empathy for the protagonist is key. A much more successful book about a young runaway drawn into the sex industry is Love, Debra by Fritz Hamilton, which is written in the form of letters from fifteen-year-old Debra to her dead mother. By the second page of the book, she has already revealed to the reader that her father and his girlfriend have been sexually abusing her and that her mother was aware of it before her death from alcoholism but did nothing to stop it. She has also decided to run away from her wealthy father's home in Wisconsin to an SRO hotel in Chicago, where she encounters a horrific series of problems including sexual assault, drug use, abortion, and being imprisoned in a psych ward. After running out of money, Debra, like Anna, turns to prostitution as a means of survival. She is assaulted and abused, but is too young to go on welfare and reluctant to go back to her sexually abusive father. She leaves Chicago in the hopes of finding a better life for herself and her best friend, Richard, in San Francisco. Once there she tries to go straight but has a hard time not resorting to prostitution whenever she is in financial trouble, which is regularly. After Richard dies of AIDS, Debra leaves town in the hopes of finding a better life for herself and resisting the temptations of drugs and prostitution for good. Although the awfulness of Debra's story may seem excessive, it was not radically different from the experiences of the young women I spoke to. For example, Jane is a twenty-two year old young woman who has been off drugs and off the streets for five years after spending many of her teen years in juvenile hall and rehabilitation programs. Growing up in an affluent suburb, Jane was not allowed as much freedom as she would have liked. Her parents severely restricted the time she was allowed to spend with friends and the friends she was allowed to have. She says that at age ten she tried smoking and drinking, and at thirteen she started using methamphetamines intravenously on a regular basis. Her mother found a syringe in her room that year; Jane said her mother's reaction was to cry and ground her. Jane said she didn't read a lot of young adult literature during that time, but that she was a good student. "I think that I didn't read a lot of young adult books because I was more into classic authors," she said. At the age of fifteen, she started using her drug of choice, heroin. The first time Jane tried heroin she overdosed. Paramedics were called and she got into legal trouble as a result. On her court date she ran away from home for the first time. She went to San Francisco with her boyfriend, and they were homeless together. She said that this was the first time in her life that she felt genuinely free. Like the other young women I spoke to, Jane enjoyed reading books about drugs. "I think I read books about drugs because I could relate to it," she told me. She cited Basketball Diaries and Go Ask Alice as two of her favorites as a teenager, as well as Catcher in the Rye and books by Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs. I asked her if she thought any book might have scared her out of running away. "Not a chance," she said. "It's just like, you knew drugs were bad but you did them anyhow, you know?" Like Jane, Tracey in the book Weird on the Inside by Shelley Stoehr revels in her newfound freedom after running away, even though she realizes that what she is doing is not socially acceptable. When she starts dating a boy who doesn't know much about her yet, she debates telling him the truth. She says, "I thought if I told him I was a stripper, I'd also have to tell him I was only seventeen, and a runaway, and I still hadn't finished high school, and I lived in a hooker hotel, and I pretty much liked it-all of it-most of the time, anyway." (Stoehr, 148) Stoehr seems familiar with the inner workings of strip clubs. Her details are accurate and her portrayals of Tracey's diverse group of co-workers are compassionate and absorbing. Tracey gets increasingly involved with cocaine, and considers going back to her father a number of times. The book ends with Tracey, while using the public phone in her SRO hotel, being brutally attacked by a customer who attempts to kill her. She wakes up in a hospital with her father at her side, and the reader can assume that Tracey's time as a runaway and a stripper has come to an end. Although Stoehr's finale may seem exaggerated and sensational, both Stella and Anna told me similar stories. A friend of Stella's who was working at a strip club disappeared from work one night and was not found until three weeks later-dead in a dumpster with her throat slit. Anna, too, had a number of brushes with danger at the hands of her customers. A few weeks before she got on to the methadone program she lost her favorite pair of shoes when fleeing the car of a man who broke the bottom off a beer bottle and attacked her with the jagged glass. "He tried for my neck but I got away and he only got my hand," she said expressionlessly. Even though the alarming aspects of books on teenage runaways and addicts are surprisingly accurate, these books don't necessarily have a deterrent effect on teens who are well on their way to ending up like the characters in the books. All of the young women I spoke to cited books about drugs and runaways as being their favored reading while they were growing up. It is also true that all of them had already started doing drugs before they started reading these books. Problem novels about runaways may deter kids who probably wouldn't have ended up doing heroin anyway. But to a girl like Jane, who was shooting speed at thirteen, a book about addiction and street life isn't likely to make her reconsider her self-destructive life trajectory. Rather, it may validate those life choices in her eyes. Information about the dangers of drugs and homelessness is not enough for these teenagers. For someone like Anna who can take a book like Go Ask Alice and be inspired by it-inspired to run away and do more drugs--the mere fact of Alice's death at the end isn't enough of a disincentive. In fact, the character's tragic death itself may be a motivator for a certain type of teenager. "It kind of glorified it, in my eyes," Anna said about Go Ask Alice, and this type of book in general. "I read it from the wrong perspective. If you are young and that's what you're reading and you are surrounding yourself with that kind of thing, your mind is going to run away with it and you can really turn it into a bad thing. I would read them and not take away from it that I shouldn't do this stuff; I read it from the perspective of wanting to be closer to the situation--wanting to understand it more--rather than seeing that it was trying to show me that it was a road I didn't want to go down. I was reading it more as education for what to do when I did go down that road." It is clear that the relationship between knowledge and action is infinitely more complicated than we would like to think. No one would argue that young adult literature forces, or even encourages, children to run away from home. Yet, paradoxically, books written with the intention of warning young people away from dangerous decisions instead may serve as enticement for the type of teenager who may very well be most at risk.
Works Cited Anonymous and Sparks, Beatrice. Go Ask Alice. New York: Avon, 1971. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Burgess, Melvin. Smack. New York: Avon, 1999. Burroughs, William. Junky. New York: Penguin, 1985. Burroughs, William. Queer. New York: Penguin, 1995. Carroll, Jim. The Basketball Diaries. New York: Penguin, 1995. Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993. Glovach, Anna. Beauty Queen. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Hamilton, Fritz. Love, Debra. Seattle: Open Hand Publishing. 1990. Nixon, Joan Lowry. The Séance. New York: Laurel-Leaf, 1981. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little Brown, 1991. Stoehr, Shelley. Weird on the Inside. New York: Delacorte, 1995.
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