Gossiping About Girl Books with Lizzie Skurnick

Every day at Teen Voices, we receive tons of books from publishers who want you to write about their products. We look through the piles of books, choose the ones we think Teen Voices readers will like most, and send them off to our teen Arts and Culture reviewers (read this month’s reviews here). A few months ago we realized we had a problem in the Teen Voices office: even though we’d looked through dozens of titles in previous weeks, we didn’t have more than a handful of books that we thought were good enough for our readers.

The books Teen Voices readers like are intelligent and show all kinds of girls dealing with the challenges and benefits of being young. In our April 2008 issue, for example, teens reviewed books about a girl soldier in the Israeli army, an Alaskan girl struggling with the death of her boyfriend, and an army of magical birds fighting for their freedom.

But recently, publishers haven’t seemed to be sending us these interesting, off-beat books. Instead, we have a huge recycling pile of books about frivolous, unrealistic topics: rich girls in exclusive big-city prep schools, elite cliques, and fashionista teens living rock-star lifestyles. These books are usually rip-offs of the wildly popular Gossip Girls book and TV series, and they inevitably feature girls talking trash about other girls and spending most of their time having crushes on gorgeous guys. How many girls actually live lives like these? Were we totally missing the point?

To get the scoop on trends in teen chick lit, we turned to an expert in the Young Adult publishing world, Lizzie Skurnick. A writer of teen fiction herself, and a well-known book blogger, Skurnick told us that we weren’t crazy—there really is a Gossip Girl trend in the publishing world, and it really is taking over. The silver lining of this cloud? They may be hard to find, but awesome teen novels are out there, and people like Skurnick and Teen Voices will make sure you hear about them.

Teen Voices: Why do you think so many publishers are interested in books that portray girls as gossipy, boy-crazy, and self-absorbed?
Lizzie Skurnick: I think publishers are like any other business—they try to emulate* what's worked in the past, and then the writers follow. There has always been a market for fun, frivolous fiction, and once chick lit took off, it's natural that it spread to younger girls too. On the one hand, this is fine—everyone can be shallow sometimes. But where it starts to hurt is when there's nothing else. It's a strong stereotype in our culture that all teen girls are good for is lip gloss and boy-talk. Like many things that are OK in small doses but tend to get out of control, this may never go away completely.

Teen Voices: The Gossip Girls series has been extremely successful as books and as a TV show. Do you think this has influenced publishers?
Lizzie: Yes, absolutely—even before it was made into a show, its popularity was beginning to drive the industry. The Sweet Valley High [book series of the 1980s] influenced Gossip Girls, and before Sweet Valley, there were silly books like Candy Stripers to use for brain candy. It's just that now, one product can take over a culture way more because of television and mass media.

TV: Do you think most teenage girls today are incredibly wealthy, attend exclusive prep schools and love fashion?
Lizzie: Well, I know for a fact they don't, although they may feel like they should, now. But you know, when I was growing up, we also had series about boarding schools, like The Girls of Canby Hall or Madeleine L'Engle's books And Both Were Young and Camilla; but what made them different is that the girls were such strong characters, having true experiences, not spunky episodes. You can make wealth meaningful (Harriet the Spy is pretty wealthy!), you can make fashion meaningful, and boarding schools are certainly a great opportunity to talk about friendship, just like Lois Duncan does in Down a Dark Hall. It's when these themes are a replacement for personality that we get into trouble.

TV: Why, in your opinion, are these kinds of characters interesting to readers?
Lizzie: I don't know that they are all that interesting, although I think characters who are painted in broad strokes like these girls can often be fun for everyone if the plot is juicy enough. And again, as part of a girl's library, I think they're fine. But if it's the whole thing, you have a real problem.

TV: Do you think this is a recent trend? Girls used to read series like the Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew—about girls who were enterprising and smart. When did this shift in girl characters occur? Has it always been this way?
Lizzie: I think once the publishing industry realized that they could market directly to teens, and that teens would buy these kind of books, and that ADULTS would watch shows about teens, we were done. Our entire culture has become much more shallow and entertainment-based—the news, the publishing industry, politics, schools, movies, and of course, TV. We're a sort of cartoony, youth-directed culture, far more than when I was growing up, when things directed towards teens were much more of an afterthought and certainly not anything anyone would think to exploit just for profit.

This stuff sells well in the short-term, but you'll never get books like Jacob Have I Loved, which girls still read, with this model. So publishers will have to choose what they're interested in doing. The fact that they're owned by corporations and driven heavily by marketing doesn't help, because marketers aren't the best people to dictate good literature.

TV: Are there books on the market that portray girls in a positive light? Do you have any suggestions for readers looking for more well-rounded or offbeat characters?
Lizzie: I think readers should check out my column, Fine Lines, for some great books. But off the top of my head, Virginia Hamilton, Scott O'Dell, Lois Duncan, M.E. Kerr, Madeleine L'Engle, Cynthia Voigt, Robert Cormier, Paul Zindel, Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, and Katherine Paterson can keep a good reader busy for quite awhile.

*Emulate: imitate