ANGIE THOMAS
YA AUTHOR HAS HER FINGER ON THE PULSE OF TEEN REALITY
Author Angie Thomas is not buying into the idea Young Adult novels are the younger sibling to grown-up books.
The author of the huge bestseller The Hate U Give and the newly released novel On the Come Up has always had her sights set on using her writing to talk to teens without the use of common YA make-believe tropes.
“When I was a teenager I hated reading because I couldn’t find a lot of books about people like me,” said the 31-year-old Thomas, who will be touring parts of Canada in support of the novel beginning in Vancouver on Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. at the Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre.
What replaced fiction in Thomas’s teens was hip hop.
"Hip hop was how I saw myself. That’s where I found my narrative that showed me who I was,” said Thomas. “Rappers told the stories I saw myself in when books didn’t.
“When I was a kid, two of the big books were Twilight and the Hunger Games. I have nothing against those books but I couldn’t connect with them. They weren’t featuring people like me. They weren’t sharing stories about things I could understand or relate to," Thomas said recently from her home in Jackson, Miss.
So, necessity being the mother of invention, Thomas set about to create the kind of characters and stories she wished she had access to a decade and a half ago.
“I do intentionally write for young adult audiences. I think about teenagers a lot when I’m writing, specifically young black girls because so often books aren’t written for them in mind. Books aren’t written for them, starring them or showing them as heroes.
“A lot of times YA gets a bad rap,” Thomas said. “People think there is always going to be vampires and there is so much more to YA than that.”
To prove her point, take a minute and think about your teen years: What concerned you then?
Bet it wasn’t the extreme May-December relationship between you and your undead girlfriend or boyfriend, was it?
“I often say if I had brought Edward (vampire dude in Twilight who was born in 1901) home my mom would have said: ‘You were born when? Uh uh, no sir, goodbye,’” Thomas said with a big laugh.
Free of misty forests crawling with giant werewolves and dystopian, to-the-death games, Thomas’s work is set in a fictional neighbourhood where people happen to deal with real problems.
In her first book, the long-running national bestseller The Hate U Give — which was made into a hit movie of the same name — Thomas tells the story of 16-year-old Starr. Starr’s life is complicated — she lives in a poor, mostly black neighbourhood but attends a fancy, uniform-wearing mostly white prep school. Her life is a constant balancing act between her roots and her future.
That is shattered when she is witness to a cop unjustly shooting a close childhood friend.
From there, Thomas weaves a page-turning story of racism, police brutality and growing up pretty damn fast.
For On the Come Up, Thomas returns to Garden Heights and her teenage touchstone of hip hop.
At the centre of the story is 16-year-old Brianna. The constant threat of eviction hangs over her and her mother and brother’s heads like a black cloud always threatening to crack open. Bri, as everyone calls her, is a talented writer and with help from her criminally connected Aunt Pooh finds herself in a respected rap battle contest — and she slays.
From there her reputation rises and so do her problems after a song packed with gangsta clichés — clichés she doesn’t deal in — becomes a viral hit. Adding to her problems and pressure is that her murdered father was the neighbourhood’s rap God.
Brianna, like Starr before her, is faced to deal with big, life-changing issues, issues that can make or break futures.
“A lot of times, too, the assumption is if you are writing for teenagers there can’t be any depth,” Thomas said. “That’s not true. Their issues are not superficial and we so often write them off. They are people with real problems. The fact is, we all remember what it was like when we were 16 and 17 and things that happened to us were real and they were worth talking about. If nothing else, I hope my books help validate teenagers a little more as people.”
Thomas’s reality-check literary nature extends to the idea of romantic love, particularly first love.
“A lot of books make it out that the person you like as a teenager is the one you are going to end up with. That’s a big lie in a lot of ways,” said Thomas. "It is very rare for anyone to stay with the person they had feelings for at 16.
“I think of the crushes I had as teen and I think thank God nothing happened with that.”
In On the Come Up — which will be made into a movie — one of the great things is Bri’s best pals are a pair of guys. Sure, one is gay and the other she does have some feelings for, but it is the bigger idea of building friendships without gender roles in mind that interests Thomas. In her world, girls can access male thoughts and feelings without having to have sex with them.
“I think there was a time in my life where I had more male friends then female friends,” Thomas said. “For me it was really important to show in this book platonic friendship.”
It was also important for Thomas to promote the idea of the successful female rapper, to put another female face into the male-dominated genre.
“We hear more about male rappers than female rappers. You ask someone right now name five female rappers in the industry right now who are active and they might have a hard time doing that,” Thomas said. “Then, too, there is the aspect if there are multiple women they are usually pitted against each other. You see it with Nicki and Cardi (superstar rappers Nicki Minaj and Cardi B). Nobody is pitting the guys against each other, its just these two girls as if there can only be one,” she said.
Thomas’s Brianna is a confident young woman, but not a cocky one. Despite the overthe-top song that causes her some grief, she is not about to fall prey to modern popular female rapper prototype. She is not stripping down and spitting about money and Maybachs. She has thoughts about her life and she knows she has to bring a double A game if she is going to compete with the guys.
“With Brianna I wanted her to navigate that male dominated space knowing who she is and knowing that she is capable of hanging with the boys and even being better than the boys but also recognizing at times she feels as if she has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good,” Thomas said. “I think that is something so many of us women understand completely and it is something women of colour really have to deal with.
“Hopefully it will make people think a little more, not just in hip hop but in society. What kind of message are we sending to young women to make them feel that they have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good as their male counterparts?”