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MFA THESIS: It’s, Like, Critical: The Role of Character Idiolect in Developing Authentic Voice for Female Narrators in Young Adult Fiction

Posted for @silkchemise, @steinbecks, and @reinaescarlata, who’ve all asked at one point or another to read it. Winner of the January 2016 JRT Critical Writing Award (and cash prize whoop). A note: I do not go into code-switching, bilingualism, or racialized language development in the paper, because I am inherently unqualified to write about them with any authenticity since I am white/a white-passing Jew and the whole paper is an examination of authenticity of voice, so it would have been totally gross to assert myself as being capable of having a valid stance or viewpoint on those topics. I purposely looked only at books written by white or white Jewish people with white or white Jewish first-person narrators, except in the case of The Hunger Games, which is a negative example anyway. Anyhoo!

When I was in the fourth grade, I was one of seven girls in the gifted program, Project Challenge. On the day that we had our first lesson in health and sex ed, the boys were sent to the gym to play Horse while our teacher, Ms. G., sat us in a circle to pour blue water on a maxipad and explain that as we got older, there would be miserable-sounding changes to our bodies and our lives.

Then she explained that the boys' voices would get deeper. And she looked at us, little gifted girls in her charge, and said the sentence that was my biggest takeaway from any sex ed class I was ever given in American public school:

"You're all smart girls, but that isn't going to matter unless you can learn to talk like men."

I was in fourth grade shortly after the release of Clueless, and the Valley Girl speech patterns that reigned on the West Coast had begun their eastward migration over the airwaves of ABC's TGIF lineup and forbidden, "cool teen" shows on The WB. We had learned from Alicia Silverstone to inflect upwards, to sound sarcastic, to invoke the quotative 'like' and pepper sentences with slang that we didn't understand.

After Ms. G.'s pronouncement, we would huddle together at recess and practice speaking in low, deep voices. We counted our 'like's. We worked even harder to be seen as equal to, not outnumbered by, the boys. There are pages in my diary from 1997 dedicated to documenting all of the slang words I wouldn't let myself use and what they meant: grody, to be gross; pervy, to be grosser; awesome, something wonderful; whatever, something of little importance.

Three years later, in Y2K, the Project Challenge program expanded into a full-fledged pilot program for gifted children. The twenty highest-IQ students in the district were placed in a class with minimal teacher supervision to see if we challenged each other to academic excellence; this time, there were 14 girls and 6 boys.

The six boys were also among the youngest in the room, but they ruled the roost. They chose our reading for the year, they commandeered our social experience, and their presence, more than anything else, forced the rest of us to prove that it wasn't an accident that there were more of us girls in Room 311 than boys.

Of course, stick twenty middle schoolers in a one-room schoolhouse and crushes and gossip will fly, even if they are challenging each other to read the collected works of the Shelley Circle or teaching themselves JavaScript. Like any good middle school girl in the years before cell phones, I passed elaborately folded notes with my friends -- and like any good passed note, we wrote our messages in code. Even tiny messages like "I like your smiley face shirt!" were sent in the form of hidden message word searches, the word lists populated with Harry Potter characters and places in Arthur Reed's fictional town of Elwood City. Clues might come in the form of quotes from Friends or Lizzie McGuire. Nicknames for less-benign messages were borne of scientists and philosophers we were studying or particularly nasty cafeteria foods.

Even when the boys, since we were lacking in real adult authority, confiscated our notes, they couldn't quite read them.

We were speaking outside of the system, and it let us say what we wanted to say right under their noses.

In the field of linguistics, there is a clear difference between the way we spoke, as young girls, and the way we were taught to speak, like adult men: descriptivist language versus prescriptivist language.

Descriptivism is, in its simplest definition, language as it is actually used; descriptivist linguistics focuses on all kinds of people in all walks of life and measures the evolutions of vernacular and casual speech and writing. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, is basically what it sounds like: grammarians from On High prescribing what language ‘should be.’ Larry Andrews, retired professor emeritus of the Linguistics department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, illustrates the difference with a comparison of the reception of using “less” in place of “fewer,” in a phrase like, There were fewer than/less than six dogs at the park. “A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are correct, as long as the receiver of the message can understand the meaning behind the statement. A prescriptive grammarian, on the other hand, would analyze the rules and conventions behind the statements made and determine which statement is correct according to those rules” (Andrews). The vast majority of people are descriptivists, whether they know linguistics or not. (Which, incidentally, is a grammar mistake I made on purpose, because it makes sense either way.)[1]

But in the field of literature, prescriptivism is prized.

On one hand, this view makes sense: in prescriptivist English, there is a correct way to write. It would follow, then, that if one obeys those rules, one is writing well. This idea of a perfect English, a definable ‘good writing’ schema, is a refuge in which generations of English teachers and other gatekeepers of the literary world have hidden. Steven Pinker explicates the reasoning for prescriptivists’ rigidity for Slate’s linguistics column, The Good Word, by demonstrating various ways that prescriptivists believe that adherence to traditional grammatical rules “uphold[s] truth, morality, excellence, and a respect for the best of our civilization. To indulge incorrect ones, meanwhile, is to encourage relativism, vulgar populism, and the dumbing down of literate culture.” It is a viewpoint that inherently classes the general population as incapable of or unwilling to appreciate higher forms of art, and places the institutional rules of Oxford, Webster, and Cobbett above the grubby, grasping hands of average citizens. (Sounds a lot like other weapons of the kyriarchy—but this is the one that is explicitly taught in elementary school.)

In the field of young adult literature, the lauding of prescriptivism places the goals of the category with the traditional ideals of literary fiction, and—

Okay, look.

What’s real is this: prescriptivism is a value judgment. It places a system of arbitrary and, yes, ever-changing, rules above clear communication, for one thing, implying that the ability to access, memorize, and correctly parse those rules is more important than human interconnection. But for another, as “descriptivism activist” (say that three times fast!) Melissa A. Fabello so succinctly notes, “any time we create a hierarchy by positioning one thing as ‘better’ than another, we’re being oppressive,” and in the case of prescriptivist language, that ‘one thing that’s better’ is “a reference guide created by a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal system [that] does nothing but uphold that status quo.” And that’s all it is. The type of language that is most often given the benefit of being considered correct, or authentic, or beautiful—mostly what it really is is obedient.

And teenagers? They aren’t obedient.

This causes quite a lot of hand-wringing when it comes to depictions of teenage language that are, like the kids themselves, rebellious and real: from Meghan Cox Gurdon’s worry that reading too much of The Hunger Games might “normalize pathologies” to Tim Spalding’s fret that adults who read YA may be “stunted,” and older yet, Norman Tebbit’s assertion that “If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, [it will] cause people to have no standards at all.” All of these viewpoints make an assertion that there is a ‘good English’ at all, and that moreover, ‘good English’ is what, in effect, authenticates literature. It is what so many adults, from literary gatekeepers to commute-readers, use to separate their idea of what Ruth Graham calls “trashy stuff” from “the new classics.”

It’s frustratingly unsurprising that recurrent waves of concern trolls deride YA as trashy. It’s also hard not to notice that its alleged trashiness seems tied to every other media phenomenon that is seen as “bad art,” if ever art at all: pop music, romantic comedies, primetime dramas. Basically, if a piece of media is aimed at teenage girls, cultural critics will decide that it has no merit before a single word is read or uttered. The dividing line between so-called “high art” from “low art” is the presence of a second X chromosome. Because of course, we all know that teenage girls are like, stupid and stuff. So anything that is created for them—and more than that, about them and their concerns—must also be terrible.

But somehow, girls live, despite this societal atmosphere. They create and grow. They rebel.

The continued existence of “teen girl culture” is in itself an act of triumph, and that YA lit as a category and field continues to grow and gain momentum is a monument to that triumph, to the indefatigability of teenage girls and their demand to be noticed, seen, acknowledged, respected, heard. They continue to reach out and read, despite the way books that depict them with authenticity are called trashy—and, in consequence, so are they. But that is one of the qualities that draws young adult literature to me, and to so many others: it has the capacity to notice and see and acknowledge and respect teenage girls. It tells them, we can hear you. And you deserve it.

In order to do that effectively, authenticity is key. The concerns and lives of teenage girls are as pointed and personal as those of any group seen as “more literary” or “less vapid” or whatever the case may be. Despite the impressions of some marketers, teenage girls are not a monolith. In fact, perhaps more than any other demographic group, teenage girls exalt in individuality and rely on their unique experiences to find ways to survive a world hostile to their existence. One of the major ways that they do this is through language: if the system will not cede space to make room for them, and their needs, teenage girls will find ways to speak around the system and make room for themselves. The most successful young adult books with female narrators are those whose authors allow their protagonists that space to own the story, create their own language, and connect with the reader through sharing their idiolect, rather than relying on prescriptivist paradigms.

In that Room 311 class, the lists of forbidden words disappeared as we entered into a world of our own linguistic making, where we could say ‘he was like, ‘Hi!’’ without fear of judgment. But Clueless had come out long ago, and we didn’t live like Lizzie McGuire. The slang that we heard in the media we consumed became compounded with words of our own, names that we could put to feelings that were hard to explain: nostalgic, almost embarrassingly childish joy became “moosh,” the sound of hugging a stuffed animal; arousal, “strawberry pie,” something we were aware existed but had seldom seen; every mean girl that we pinned our own projections of jealousy onto as being jealous of us was a “Kelly.”

Creating these codes felt magical, delicious in its subversion. I watched a documentary on PBS about the Enigma that same year, and the thrill of feeling that – yes, I too knew how to talk without being understood; look at those women at Bletchley Park, that could have been me – was urgent and powerful. The words that I created from my life, my experience, expressed my voice more clearly than the words I had practiced in the elementary schoolyard to sound “like a man.”

That makes sense on multiple levels: the first, of course, is that as a twelve-year-old girl I was absolutely not a grown man and it made no sense to try to sound like one; the second is that the experiential truths behind the silly sounds and coded phrases were informed by the full past of everything that I had ever seen or known or been, and what my friends and I chose to share with each other. They were borne naturally, without strict rules or definitions attached, because their meanings were clear to us listeners even on their first usages.

Of course “Kelly” meant a mean girl; we had all known Kelly B. and Kelly L. And we needed, even sequestered away from the rest of the student body, to be able to talk about our time at school and all of those years until we got to be sequestered away. We had baggage to unload and no one else to tell, because people weren’t keen at the end of the ‘90s to listen to the victims of bullies. “Kelly” was a word wielded as a sword and a shield: able to talk shit about the people who had hurt us while protecting our own feelings from having to admit who had done it, what they’d really done, who they’d been, who we were. I have been hurt and let down again and again by people pretending to be my friends was too big a concept to put into words when I had a run-in with a Kelly today meant the same.

While I would never use that phrase today – it smacks of internalized misogyny, for one thing, and for another I have little need for it – “Kelly” and the experiences of needing it, creating it, and using it to express complex emotional concepts are all still a part of my idiolect.

In linguistics, an idiolect is the unique, individualized language use of one person, and one person only, and both influences and is influenced by their experiences and attitudes; “language” itself is only a collection of the common features of many individuals’ idiolects: in essence, “the English language” is what English-speakers make it. But which English speakers?

Contrary to what your AP English teacher, Comp 101 professor, scaremonger on NPR, or hatemonger on FOX News may say, the most common originator of language forms in English is, and has always been, the adolescent girl. According to University of Helsinki linguists Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, “[adolescent girls] been on the cutting edge of the English language since at least the 1500s” (H. Thompson). By the summer of 2015, 11 of the 14 major shifts of modern English since the Elizabethan era have been traced to letters authored by teenage girls. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg attribute this to the way that “female letter-writers changed the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers, spearheading the adoption of new words and discarding words like ‘doth’ and ‘maketh’” (H. Thompson).

This doth maketh sense to leading cultural linguist Gretchen McCullogh, who ascribes her interest in language to the birth of the internet and netspeak in the ‘90s—when she believes prescriptivism became obsolete. She devotes a Tumblr, AllThingsLinguistic, to looking at the changing landscape of netspeak and, inherently, girlspeak. In discussing the Helsinki study, she notes that

In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time. In other words, women are reliably ahead of the game when it comes to word-of-mouth linguistic changes. This trend hasn’t changed much. While young people have long driven innovation, it’s not just an age thing—it’s also a gender thing. During the decades that sociolinguists have been researching the question, they’ve continually found evidence that women lead linguistic change. (McCulloch LW)

These social, sociable language shifts made English as we know it today: it was teenage girls who began to phase out the usage of the informal “thee” and “thou,” instead referring to each other solely by the then-formal “you” in their correspondence[2] (Gendered Pronouns).

While historical linguists have no declarative reasoning proven for this shift, I have my own hypothesis: it was because they were referring to each other with respect. And, on seeing that adolescent girls called each other ‘you,’ all of the (adult, male, likely titled) people who felt themselves more respectable than the most dreaded demographic began to do the same. After all, no particular group in Western history has quite the same track record of being so universally considered unworthy of respect – across all other geographic, historical, and racial boundaries.

The patriarchy is real, tho.

But in letters to and from one another, why should friends and peers – even young and female – not show each other esteem? Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunburg argue that “women may have greater social awareness, bigger social networks or even a neurobiological leg up” (H. Thompson) when it comes to conversational language, and anthropologists support that assertion with their suggestion that women and girls have always been the “communal glue” of the human race, forming the backbone of social groups. In the era of the Helsinki study, the dissolution of “thee” and “thou” for the formal “you” would have served as another way to strengthen that backbone. Of course you, my friend, deserve respect, and if you do, then so do I, your pen-pal. This hypothesis is supported by studies by Jennifer Coates, Ruth Bodak, and Gertrude Benke, who coined the term “Sex/Prestige Pattern” to describe the recurrent phenomenon of female speakers being more likely than men to refer to others of the same sex using formal, or “prestige,” grammatical forms and word choices; “in many speech communities female speakers will use a higher proportion of prestige forms than male speakers. Women tend to use fewer stigmatized forms than men, and… are particularly sensitive to new prestige variants” (Grégoire).

A contemporary parallel that’s happened within the last few weeks (October/November 2015) is the popularization on mainstream media and news programs of the phrase “I’m [X interest] trash.”

For the last several years, young people on the internet—I’ve seen mostly teenage girls and nonbinary peeps—have referred to their obsessions as “trash” as an allusion to both the whole “if they like you they’re mean to you” cliché and “white trash,” the euphemistic insult for classlessness. In the last year or so, that trend shifted to referring to the self, the obsessor, as “[X interest] trash.” Google searches for “Larrie trash,” “Swift trash,” “Steven Universe trash,” and “The 100 trash” all turned up more than 2,000 results, with “Larrie trash” topping the list at 32,600 results. That “Larries,” or those who believe that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson of One Direction are in a secret relationship, have the most maligned interest in this search group as well as the highest tendency to refer to themselves as trash underscores its etymological genesis.

(There are whole layers here to discuss whether it’s a reclamation of the right to obsess or a self-acknowledgment of the social unacceptability of female passion—or both!—but that is neither here nor there.)

In the case of both the disappearing “thee” and being “[X interest] trash,” the phrases’ origins with teenage girls were usurped and brought to mainstream attention by adult men. In the case of being trash of the thing, the adult man is known: MacArthur fellow Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer and star of Broadway’s Hamilton.

On October 31, 2015, Miranda was surprised before a performance by three teenage girls dressed in Halloween costumes of, in their words, “Hamilton trash” (Ham4Ham). He explained the costumes, and phenomenon, as “The kids, when they like something on the internet, they call themselves the trash of the thing” (Miranda), and the phrase went viral.

Once nighttime talk show host Jimmy Fallon, a white adult man, admitted that he too is Hamilton Trash, the word and its usage had become undeniably normalized. While it may be contentious for a while amongst prescriptivists and olds, the future of English may well see the word “fan” replaced with “trash,” when talking about the liking of the things. I’m not particularly trash of this shift, but I can’t deny that it’s happened.

Essentially the same thing happened when teenage girls began to remove “thee” and “thou” from the vocabulary, replacing them with a blanket “you.” (The same, minus nighttime talk show hosts spreading the news.) After a few years of underground language disruption, an adult man, or adult men, began to copy the same speech pattern and “normalized” it, or rather, gave it patriarchal permission to be the normal way of speaking. A 2009 Linguistic Society of America study by Sali A. Tagliamonte and Alexandra D’Arcy found that “men trail by about a generation... largely due to adult male blowback against female stereotypes in speech” (H. Thompson), while McCullogh believes that the reason for this years-long simmering before mainstream acceptance stems from something much simpler: “women learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers” (McCullogh LW). The pattern for language innovation is, essentially:

Teenage girls do the thing.

Men mock the thing, but teenage girls keep doing it.

Those teenage girls grow up and have sons.

Those sons learn to speak from their mothers.

They proceed to mock those who don’t speak like their mothers.

Usually, that’s the teenage girls next door.

This pattern of adoption is so common in language shifts that linguists have a cheeky acronym-slash-pun for older white men being late-adopters of slang: the NORM. That is, the Non-mobile Older Rural Male. General theory of language adoption runs along the lines that a word or phrase has been fully integrated into English once the NORM use it, and has been phased out when even the NORM no longer use it. If the last, most reticent demographic to shift their speech patterns are the NORM, then it stands to reason that the first and most eager language players are their binary opposite: the mobile, young, urban female. (They don’t have an acronym because MYUF is not a pun on anything, I suppose.)

Mobile, young women create coded language and shift their syntax and vary pronunciations more quickly in 2015 than ever before. Social media’s prevalence gives them—and us adults—instant access to a wider base of communication partners. This means we can access more idiolects, engage with language on a variety of social levels in disparate relationships, and learn through exposure, trying on and individuating the idiolectic phrases we absorb. At the same moment in time, this access to descriptivist language has media and knowledge guardians panicking.

“DO YOU CREAK?” asks Slate’s linguistics podcast, Lexicon Valley. “Although we somehow managed to endure that frightful fad [upspeak] and beat back the apocalypse... another pox is now upon us [vocal fry]” (Vuolo). To demonstrate how teen girls talk today, one of the podcast contributors, Bob Garfield—a 60-year-old white man—beckoned his eleven-year-old granddaughter to the mic and commanded, “Ida, be obnoxious.”

Lifelong misogynist Christopher Hitchens referred to the vocative ‘like’ as “the other L-word” for Vanity Fair, explaining that “when Caroline Kennedy managed to say ‘you know’… on 130 occasions while talking to The New York Times… she proved… that she was (a) middle-aged and (b) middle class. If she had been a generation younger and a bit more déclassé, she would have been saying ‘like’.” In the same piece, he argues that both the quotative and vocative ‘like’ can, however, be elevated to a classé-er status when one considers that, like… men use them. “[Like] can be of use to a natural raconteur,” Hitchens advises, and cites Shaggy Rogers of Scooby-Doo; “the awesome Droogs,” or violent rapists of A Clockwork Orange; and Frank Zappa as such eloquent yarn-spinners.[3]

“JUST SAY NO,” warns Ellen Leanse, a self-described “tech veteran” and former Google executive as she advises that women simply must stop using the word “just” in all communication, written or verbal, if they want to get ahead in the business world. Because that is the only thing keeping many women from becoming CEOs, obviously.

“Why Women Apologize and Should Stop,” opines Sloane Crosley: “it comes off as passive-aggressive—the easiest of the aggressions to dismiss.” Because when you don’t get that CEO position, even after eliminating “just” from your vocabulary, it’s because you showed too much acknowledgment for the feelings of others.

But then, of course, the ultimate social threat may come to fruition. Tara Mohr tries to broach the topic gently as she explains how women undermine themselves with emotional language, and admits “Honestly, I would first ask women to consider, am I okay with sometimes being considered bitchy by some people?”

With traditional prescriptivist media’s constant harping about how teenage girls, and the women they grow up to be, just speak wrong, and using social media as their well of examples and scapegoats, there is more need than ever before to shift language in YA if we want to be accurate, faithful, and impactful in our narrative choices.

The malleable, protean, beautiful density of teen girl language and the way that it can be used to speak around and outside of the system is a necessary and integral aspect of the teenage experience. There is no particular group in any intersection of society whose voices are more frequently silenced than young women: regardless of race, sexual orientation, disability, or economic status, the burden of being young and female-identifying adds onto the silencing of any, and all, other factors of marginalization.

A queer black teenage girl is inevitably stereotyped more and listened to less than a queer black teenage boy.[4] Latina, East Asian, Native, and black teenage girls suffer distinctly more sexual assault and harassment because their voices, their “no,” go unheard[5]. Girls are less likely to be treated for mental illness, depression, and suicidal ideation because “teen girls are just dramatic, they want attention,” and it’s such a sad surprise when their pain turned out to have been real[6]. Even straight white cisgender teenage girls see misogyny more deeply felt and expressed than the women they’ll grow up to be do—“basic teenage girls” are practically the bane of mainstream Western culture, insofar as things people feel allowed to talk shit about in public, what with their pumpkin spice coffee and their One Direction and their wearing the leggings that adult men designed for them but aren’t allowed to fuck them yet for wearing.

It is our responsibility, as adults, as human beings, and especially as writers of books for young people—and particularly for young women—to acknowledge their ownership of their voices and their speech in our narratives. This is doubly true in an era of contemporary YA that does not shy away from on-page scenes of rape and rape culture, intersectionality struggles, hate crimes and violence, the effects of mental illness, and experiences of trauma. Identity politics are part of the everyday lives of millennial readers and the “contemporary” world being recreated in the pages of books that address those questions through the minds of teenage, female protagonists have the capacity to be immensely helpful as they address, create, and respect, the nuance and idiolect of their narrator.

It is imperative to allow their feelings and their choices and their passions to be championed as valid and worth listening to, whether they are as dark as suicidal ideation or as fluffy as a boy band obsession. Or, like many real girls: our characters can be allowed to have both.

Yet, in the conversation about YA literature among adult critics, we rarely see any awareness of the linguistic realities of teenage girls. There seems to be a general, and unfortunate, working theory among mainstream adult-lit readers, critics, and non-reader-but-critic-anyway essayists that the Young Adult category must be, by default, emotionally and conceptually simple if the language patterns don’t follow those of classic adult literature.

Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff… I’m talking about the genre the publishing industry calls “realistic fiction.” These are the books… about real teens doing real things, and that rise and fall not only on the strength of their stories but, theoretically, on the quality of their writing…

[C]rucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults… Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. (Graham)

However, if they did follow those Adult Literature For Serious Adults patterns—the very structure that Graham desires, the “endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction,” the stilted and formalistic prose of moral quandary and ennui beyond the true experience of the narrators, as is the case with her examples of the Brontë sisters’ and Megan Abbott’s takes on adolescence—it would render the complex emotions and concepts of high-level YA to be simplistic.

For the real depth of emotion in a successful YA novel to resonate, every aspect of the novel has to feed into that emotional truth. An honest YA voice considers its source, from the length of words to the shape of the sentences to the configuration of chapters or beats.

Devotion to emotional truth is what can take the accuracy of a teenage emotional landscape—which seems to be, at its heart, the argument against the plausibility of YA being resonant with “smart” readers—and retain its realism while transforming its expression into literary art. That is the essence of young adult literature. That is the platonic ideal to which we must all aim: the realism of the emotional experience of adolescence, heightened to express an honest engagement with our readers and their own emotional landscapes. And, of course, to honor our characters by allowing them the dignity of a full emotional landscape—high-peaked mountains of desire, trenches of teen angst, and perhaps even a plain of ennui once in a while. Authenticity of language bolsters the poignancy of those emotions and renders teenage experience, from the realistic and banal to the fantastical, as worthy of respect and dignity.

Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up takes on, and validates, a topic so culturally taboo that it feels dirty to admit: the feelings of a teenage girl, post-breakup with the guy who took her virginity. And he, Handler, takes his protagonist seriously! Continuously! On every page of the book, his writing of her emotional introspection and sense of self… exist. And are fully fleshed into a well-rounded, complete narrating protagonist who exists as infinitely more than the girl who was dumped. There are clear layers to Min Green that influence her language and thinking and have nothing to do with her ex, Ed. In committing to that vision, Handler successfully fulfills the premise of the novel, that the internal being of Min as a person and Ed’s inability to see her as more than A Girl is why they broke up, and he showcases an incredibly effective and consistent use of idiolect to build both novel and character.

Handler’s technique for building Min’s idiolect is deceptively simple: he gives her a passion. In a world where YA protagonists are often written to be passionate about an interest only until some dude comes along to show them the light—because, let’s be real, that is the trajectory assumed of real girls and women, too—Handler does not succumb to letting Ed overshadow Min’s love for old Hollywood movies. Even when Ed, as a character, actively tries to loom larger in Min’s life than the flickers of the silver screen, Min’s language proves that it can never be. She may love Ed, wholly and really, but she has loved movies for longer and their influence on her perceptions eclipse anything else… including, as she admits herself, the reality of Ed as a person.

[T]hen, like Gloria Tablet must have felt when she served coffee to Maxwell Meyers and found herself screen-testing the next day, then you pointed at me, right at me, and grinned and I froze… (110)

Min’s self-reflexive comparison of her own feelings to those she imagines accomplishes multiple aims in the novel. It acknowledges the dearth of her own life experience; Min is an exceptionally smart, well-spoken teenage girl, but she has still lived only sixteen years and Ed Slaterton is her first love and first heartbreak. Her gauge for these new feelings comes, like many of ours do, from how they’ve been taught to her through pop culture. She knows the relief of catharsis because of a fictitious film noir heroine, which Handler expresses in a paragraph that perfectly sets up Min’s idiolect from the opening pages:

A rare [smile] lately. Lately I’ve been like Aimeé Rondelé in The Sky Cries Too, a movie, French, you haven’t seen. She plays an assassin and dress designer, and she only smiles twice in the whole film. Once is when the kingpin who killed her father gets thrown off the building, which is not the time I’m thinking of. It’s the time at the end, when she finally has the envelope with the photographs and burns it unopened in the gorgeous ashtray and she knows it’s over and lights a cigarette and stands in that perfect green of a dress watching the blackbirds swarm and flurry around the church spire. I can see it. The world is right again, is the smile…

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up. (4)

Handler takes full advantage of descriptivist linguistics in Min’s idiolect from her diction to her syntax to the types of imagery she employs. Syntactically, almost the whole novel is written in rushing run-on sentences. This makes sense on a literal action level, since Min is rushing to write her feelings and spite and vindication in this letter to Ed to explain why they broke up; Min is also writing in a stream-of-consciousness, figuring out for herself why they broke up even as she tells Ed. Handler successfully uses this idiolect to temper the delicate balancing act of allowing the crushing hugeness of first love and first heartbreak to happen and to be felt without writing Min in a way that adult readers—or critics—can easily dismiss her as “just a melodramatic teenage girl.” When Min chooses to be dramatic, she is literally being dramatic; Handler’s creation of an idiolect influenced by film allows for Min’s perceptions to be filtered through the precepts of drama in a way that feels both organic and, by their nature, overtly constructed.

Indelible is the word the book uses, When the Lights Go Down, indelible images is what they keep saying. The brass mask of the emperor, floating faceup in the churning water before slowly sinking into black in Realm of Rage. Patricia Ocampo’s sad, contemptuous gaze at the departing stagecoach in The Last Days of El Paso. Paolo Arnold screaming at the sky and carving the Sphinx. Bette Madsen’s legs they call indelible, the splits she does in What a Hoot! with those impossible stockings, the children playing as the assassin bleeds on the other side of the fence is indelible in The Body Is a Machine (Le corps est une machine), the flying saucers in Flying Saucers! indelible too… One I have is me in the empty bandshell of Bluebeard Gardens… In the indelible image, I am alone eating pistachios and lining up perfectly the shells in half circles getting smaller and smaller like parentheses in parentheses. Really, you were just checking for electricity.

…I could see it in an aerial angle like a still in When the Lights Go Down… ‘Establishing shot’ is what the caption would say, ‘from The Moron Who Thought Love Was Forever.’ (203-204, 294)

We also see, as readers, that her emotions are real, but in their realness, they are incomparable to anything else in her own life. This does not negate the validity of her feelings. It makes them relatable to other young readers who have not experienced their own heartbreak, but whose world is also saturated with love stories. It makes her feelings bigger, more universal, even as they become more specific. These idiosyncrasies and specificities of Min’s perception, expressed through Handler’s choices in her narrative, take Min from being a character and a sad dumpee into being a fully-rounded person. This enhances the book as a whole in the context of it being Min’s “Dear John” letter to Ed, as well; since it’s written in an epistolary structure, as a letter from Min to a directly stated person, the whole novel functions as part of an ongoing conversation. Min’s diversions into Hollywood history and her coffee preferences and her fever-dream search for long-dead actress Lottie Carson accomplish what sociologist Heather Havrilesky calls “the logic of human communication,” which is what all first-person narratives must strive to do: “It's about opening up a small window to one person's internal world, so the other person can take a peek inside. It's about intimacy, in other words” (Havrilesky).

By the time the reader turns the last page on Why We Broke Up, we absolutely have an intimate knowledge of Min. We know, from the explanation of her “world is right again” smile, that Min is a girl who thinks visually; she perceives detail, and has an emotional attachment to the film that has influenced her interpretation of the scene she’s describing; she’s a girl who can’t help telling people about the thing she loves; she sees, like a filmmaker, in light and shadow and color. She sees her classmates’ faces “snarling like Doris Quinner at the end of Truth on Trial” (126) and basketball team bonfire “like the panic in Last Train Leaving” (257). It is very difficult to harbor the same level of dismissive disrespect for a person, or character, you know intimately than one you don’t.

In a book about teen-girl passion, teen-girl heartbreak, a book that is more character study than novel, this is the most respectful authorial choice that Handler could make. He affords his protagonist the respect of acknowledging that she is more than the boy she dated. Her life has existed and will continue to exist on a thousand layers, and all of them have influenced the way that she expresses her place in the world. Why she and Ed broke up is that he didn’t see her as a person—so Handler doesn’t give his readers the choice to make that same mistake.

My own first breakup was also my first day of high school. I’d actually forgotten that I was dating anyone until the guy called about an hour before our Freshman Orientation Day started and said that he wanted to “expand his horizons and date other people,” and I was like, “I haven’t heard from you in a month and our new school is literally across the street from our old school and someday this will be a song by Taylor Swift, but okay.” I didn’t have any of the heartbreak or difficult existentialist questions about it that Min does in Why We Broke Up (or that Taylor Swift does on all of her albums), but it did mean that on multiple planes, I was a blank space.

(Okay, the Taylor puns are over. I swear.)

Entering high school meant that I was exiting the gifted pilot program that had been, really, the only place I’d ever found friends who made me feel comfortable. I was being mainstreamed with classmates who’d seen me only sparingly for the last three years, usually doing something objectively really weird, and with new kids from two other middle schools. Only of the other girls from my grade level from the pilot program was being mainstreamed alongside me; of the other two, one had moved over the summer and the other elected a private high school. All of my other friends were either younger, still in middle school, or they lived far away—people I had found through a new passion that summer, something that opened up a whole new language for me. It didn’t matter anymore that the people with whom I passed crossword-puzzle origami notes were not going to be by my side, because every day, I got to return home and dial up the modem to e-mail with hundreds of girls who talked and thought like I did: fandom.

The summer after eighth grade was the time that I discovered my first boy band. Oh, of course I’d known about *NSync and Backstreet Boys and I knew the whole dance to “Bye Bye Bye” and could sing “I Want It That Way” in my sleep, but I didn’t get them. They were old and I was young and it seemed (and still seems) creepy to me that men in their twenties were being marketed as sex objects to underage girls. But then, in a commercial break during Hey Arnold!, an advertisement for short-lived New York City boy band Dream Street aired and my entire world changed. They were my own age. Their interviews used references that I’d grown up with, too; I understood, I remembered alongside them. Their main marketing strategy was “approachability,” and man, did it work. They were “a handful of clean-cut boys next door…turned…into fuzzy, desexualized plush toys that you’d feel safe leaving with your 14-year-old daughter” (Brown), or, in my case as said 14-year-old… just ‘boys I’d feel safe with.’ A rare commodity.

Within a week, I’d taught myself basic HTML and started a website for them. In some ways, that first week set up the trajectory for the rest of my life, because that was also the week that I started writing fanfiction.

Fanfiction is an inexhaustible, exhausting, exhilarating, major force for linguistic innovation. To observe fanfiction culture is to watch a microcosm of civilization itself. Back in 2001, when I entered the writing part of the fanfiction world (I had been reading Harry Potter fic since 1998, but only in the short bursts of time that I could be sure my parents weren’t home and wouldn’t notice that I was reading Kissing Stories), the internet had not yet developed social media. It was Web 1.0 and the language of fandom reflected that. Many of the terms that created the early days of internet fandom were holdovers from the ink-and-paper ‘zine fandoms of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which were still places of male social domination: Star Wars got ‘zines, Star Trek got ‘zines, Moonlighting and The X-Files and Sherlock Holmes got ‘zines. Fanfiction had to share space with essays about collectibles and arguments about canonical knowledge and notices about meet-ups for trades and sales. The stories had to be vetted for canon accuracy[7] according to collectivist male fandom[8] standards.

Until the internet. The internet liberated fandom from the need for paper-printed ‘zines, postage stamps, and brown-paper packages. Suddenly, stories could be any length: there were no boundaries of cost or ink. Communication could fly just as easily and cheaply between a fangirl in Chicago and a fangirl in Qatar without the hassle of transatlantic phone calls or international mailers. There were no limits. And there were no gatekeepers. ‘Zines had editors. Standards and practices. A caste system. The internet let everyone in a fandom love their stuff their own way.

By the time I got there, fanfiction had carved out its own place in fandom culture, a subculture within a subculture of the larger culture of “liking stuff that exists.” In being able to cultivate and grow its own space, fanfiction grew legs that stretched in directions that collectivist fandom’s never would: alternate universes, queer relationships, crossovers between different media properties, fanfiction for things that didn’t even have collectibles. Those encouraged fandoms to intermingle, and the idiolects of different groups began to merge. Japanese anime fans brought “lemon” (explicit penetrative sex) and “lime” (explicit non-penetrative sex) into the fanfiction world, while Star Trek taught the world “slash,” the only Web 1.0 Fandom term to still thrive today. Listservs became clubs, places to meet and chat and interact, not just passively subscribe. And all the while, my own interaction with my Dream Street boy band fandom influenced the language that I wrote my site, and my stories, with, too. I was KTDSPAF (Keeping the Dream Street Pride Alive Forever) and a teenipopper until the end.

And through the stilted language of emoticons and dial-up speeds, I found my way through high school. I wrote fanfiction in all of my notebooks during class, and when I got home, I logged in online to trade e-mails with faraway girls I felt a real connection with. I worked on coordinated promotional campaigns spearheaded by my favorite Dream Street member’s mother. (My favorite member was, as my dad still refers to him, The Stupid But Pretty One.) I taught myself CSS and early Java; I wrote to radio station managers to access old audio reels from the boys’ childhood Broadway interviews. My passion for Dream Street rivalled Min’s for movies in the way it loomed large over all of my thoughts and interactions. As Lisa A. Lewis, editor of The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, notes, this is not unusual: “In fandom, moods and feelings become organized and particular…personas take on significance. By participating in fandom, fans construct coherent identities for themselves. In the process, they enter a domain of cultural activity of their own making, which is, potentially, a source of empowerment in struggles against…the unsatisfactory circumstances of everyday life” (Lewis). Fandom, and all of the linguistic play that it necessitates, is an act of aggressive self-assertion. I owned my stories. I owned the narrative that I believed, and chose to believe, and helped to construct. I owned my views on sex, on relationships, on consent. The abbreviations and portmanteaus of fandom in Web 1.0 had given me a way to take ownership of my life.

Today, mainstream media has a strange and condescending obsession of its own with fandom and fanfiction, thanks to the newfound practice of culling popular fanworks for traditional publication. Periodicals from the extremely derisive Atlantic to the infuriatingly misled Cosmopolitan post thinkpieces[9] about “what is fanfiction?” or “fandom: why do girls insist on liking things besides accessible needy local penises?” on a more-or-less monthly pattern. As outsiders force their way deeper into fanfiction subculture, the language used becomes more insular—and so do the topics. As Lev Grossman noted in Time magazine, fanfiction is a world where teenage girls and women are making “a powerful critique” of the formal structure of media and assumptions of gender roles and heteronormativity therein, that there’s “almost punk-like anger, being expressed there” (Canavan). Mainstream encroachment on fanfiction means that one of the only linguistic safe-spaces for innovative young women is becoming monitored, skimmed, searched, borrowed from, and—to an immense degree—mocked by adult men and the masochistic lady journalists who want to be seen as Flynnian Cool Girls.

It is the modern-day equivalent of Shakespearean vassal lords or whatever melting the sealing wax on teenage girls’ letters to read them and send them to monks to write out in vellum books and use as evidence to burn them at the stake. Whenever another article about how bizarre those Larry Stylinson shippers are LOL! comes out, I wonder: have we just lost a link to dissolving our own English of its “thee” and “thou”? What will happen as it becomes progressively clearer that there are no places left where teenage girls can address each other with respect without intervention from adults who need them not to learn to respect one another—and themselves?

That may sound dire, and it probably is a shade hyperbolic, but dude: teenage girls and young women are doing amazing things with descriptivist language right now. We cannot afford, as a communicating species, to shame it out of them. “Now we’re messing around with syntax — the structure of sentences, the order in which the various parts go and how they relate to one another,” says linguist Clive Thompson. “This stuff people are doing with the subordinate clause, it’s pretty sophisticated, and oddly deep. We’re not just inventing catchy new words. We’re mucking around with what makes a sentence a sentence” (C. Thompson). There are many examples of this that have “gone viral,” AKA been normalized as parts of language, in the last few years, from “I can’t even” to “I want this because reasons.[10]”

Prescriptive linguists despise this kind of syntactic play. The New York Times Magazine sneered at a similar clause-dropping phrase, “I can’t even,” by glibly pooh-poohing that “at least the Valley Girls of the 1980s and ’90s, who turned every statement into a question, and the vocal-fried pop tarts of the early 2000s, who growled almost inaudibly, had the decency to finish their sentences. Kids today, it seems, are so mindless that they can’t even complete their verb phrases” (Hess).

Besides being mind-numbingly boring and facile, this pretentious assumption that young people are acting without intention when they remove a verb phrase—a major sentence component—demonstrates a lack of understanding about contemporary teenage lives. Of course there’s no verb phrase in “I can’t even”—the speaker, or writer, can’t even find the right verb to express their emotions. That is literally where the phrase came from.

Like, I can’t even with how obvious it is and how obtuse and willfully ageist the pedantic concern-trolls must be to insist otherwise.

The issue of intention in diction of young people, particularly young women, doesn’t seem to get much consideration when discussions about “female speech,” or character voice, come up. While it’s true that in some cases, “like” serves as a vocal tic, it is more commonly used with the intentions inherent of the quotative or the vocative: it is a word with meaning, and the people who choose to use the word “like” in those paradigms do so deliberately. It is a cultural marker, a prestige word, and a valid colloquialism. In issues of syntactic play, whether a character, or person, wants something “because reasons,” thinks “it me,” or is so excited that they “can’t even,” the intention of the clausal deletion is still there.

The gap between written English and spoken English is lessening: Glasgow-based linguist Harley Grant notices that particularly among social media users younger than 25, the target audience for YA books, people no longer write in either the formal written English of schoolrooms or the stilted and abbreviation-reliant short-form preferred in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Instead, adolescents and young adults online textually communicate in a very informal, speech-like register” (Grant 4) and incorporates a

[r]un-on narrative style [that] frequently employs few (if any) commas or full stops to divide clauses and sentences. I tend to refer to this writing style as the “stream-of-consciousness” style, as the text flows uninterruptedly, making the computer-mediated “utterance” appear to be spontaneous, and unplanned. (5)

While I would not suggest, nor would I predict, that novels be written in the full depth of this sublanguage, denying that this is a shared idiolect of many YA readers would be another act of dismissal by adults of adolescent language. The shifting, morphing shape of sentences themselves, both literally and figuratively, is of deep importance for cultural reading of teenagers. Their skill in adapting written language to better convey their physiological emotions and spoken voices is something to envy and respect, not demean. The current evolution of teenspeak is a prime example of what McCulloch calls “‘stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence.’ Most of these syntax-morphing memes consist of us trying to find clever new ways to express our feelings” (C. Thompson). It follows, in that light, that teenage girls are linguistic innovators: adolescence is a time of what Meg Cabot’s Mia Thermopolis repeatedly calls “a journey of self-actualization,” and what the bildungsroman genre relies on as a search for life’s answers. The emotions and growth of teenage life are all too often incoherent as the world moves too fast, buffeting teens like leaves on the wind. Whether looking back as adults writing YA or teens writing real-time Snapchat captions, converting that emotional incoherence into a clear, evocative language and story is a cathartic necessity.

One author who shows true mastery in the skill of allowing her protagonists’ search for better ways to express their feelings to influence the structure of both sentences and books themselves is novelist e.lockhart. While her entire oeuvre, including her young middle grade novels and chapter books as Emily Jenkins, rely on clever wordplay in their underlying concepts—particularly Upside-Down Magic, which would be nothing without its dritten, or dragon/kitten—her young adult novels are where her skill with descriptivist language comes into play.

In her first young adult novel, The Boyfriend List, lockhart creates a protagonist, Ruby Oliver, known as Roo, who thinks in deliberate lists and elaborations as she works to heal from the onset of a panic disorder. Her explanations of the events that led up to her first panic attack are layered with footnotes and cycled reanalysis of her classmates. Memories of when times were better—before the panic attack, before a rift opened with her best friends, before she was dumped by the notorious Jackson Clarke, before she was an “famous slut” (Boyfriend 4)—weave in and out of her narrative as she tries to explain to herself exactly what happened.

“Know what’s true?” Kim said, a week after school started, tenth grade year. She and Cricket and I were sitting on the grass outside the refectory after lunch, drinking pop and people-watching.i Cricket was braiding her long blond hair into tiny braids.

“Tell me what’s true,” I said.

…I decided to spill my guts about this minor weirdness from second grade that clearly no one remembered except me and him. I told Kim the whole story… Kim was my best friend. I wanted her to understand why I had been so weird with Finn. I figured I could tell her everything.

But now, I wish I hadn’t.

i The refectory is Tate Prep’s pompous way of saying lunchroom. Or rather, food building. The school has like eight different buildings, all around a big lawn (the quad). It’s pretty posh. (35-36, 41-42)

The beauty of Roo’s story is not the story in itself, but in the way that lockhart uses Roo’s language to show the depth of these frankly, commonplace, events have on Roo as an individual. Many girls are cheated on, many girls alienate and are alienated by their friends, many girls go on relationship benders, many can’t forget every bit of romance or attraction they’ve ever known: but no one else gels them together just like Roo. And no writer captures that singularity quite like lockhart.

One of the techniques that lockhart uses to build Roo’s complexity as a narrator is individuated slang. In the same way that my middle school friends called mean girls “Kellys,” Roo and her friends, or rather her ex-friends, deem boys that are ‘good enough, but nothing special’ to be “muffins.” No one really turns down a muffin if offered, but very rarely will a person seek out a muffin above any other baked good. “Not as festive as a cake. Not as glamorous as a croissant. Not as scrumptious as a cookie” (36).

There are muffins and black cats and jelly babies and wenchery and unique words all through The Boyfriend List and its subsequent books, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends*, as well as lockhart’s Fly on the Wall and Dramarama. They are bubbly and fun and tactile, sounds that are hard not to mouth along the first time you encounter them in the text.

Ag! Once you start seeing a shrink, everything you say sounds dirty (6).

Bick: His real name is Travis Schumacher. But have you ever seen the movie Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro? Scariest thing ever. De Niro plays a kind of sad, likable psychopath named Travis Bickle. If you ever hear people going, “You talkin’ to ME?” they’re imitating Taxi Driver. Anyway, Travis Schumacher… Travis Bickle… Bickle… Bick. There you go. (53)

Cricket said she was pretty sure there were only messages from his friend Mike, or some similar Neanderthal… (75)

Yes, Tate is that Christiancentric (as Mr. Wallace would say). (99)

“The warrior princess was covered with the strange green spots of leprosy,” Noel went on in his announcer voice, “but that did not diminish her charms nor impair her miraculous kung fu and painting abilities.”

I kickboxed the air in front of me. “Tcha!” (174)

They add texture to Roo’s already cable-knit universe, replete with a performance artist mother, a home on a houseboat, and a pygmy goat named Robespierre. The relish that Roo gets from these nuggets of belonging, in her shared language with even the memory of her friends, is palpable. In The Boy Book, the second book of the Ruby Oliver Quartet, Lockhart debuts one function of shifted language that will become a trademark of her work: the comfort code.

Roo cannot admit, even to herself, the overwhelming power of her anxiety, so she creates a coded word that she is more comfortable using: Reginald.

“I’m doing Reginaldii today,” I said. “You can ignore me.”

ii Reginald is the name I have for what Doctor Z would prefer I call “experiencing a grieving process” or “coping with the loss of my entire life, such as it was.” Because phrases like grieving process make me gag. (Boy Book 24)

More than a euphemism but too literally translated to be a symbol, and not a direct comparison, lockhart’s technique here is both common in both reality and in YA fiction, but I cannot find a satisfactory name for the phenomenon. As such, I am referring to it as “comfort coding.” Unlike slang, which is a marker of shared identification in a group—even a tiny group, like four friends, as in The Boyfriend List—a comfort code is often a very solitary affair. Roo uses hers in a therapeutic sense to destigmatize and lessen the internal drama of having a panic attack; however, other characters—and other real teenagers—will create comfort codes to compensate for other types of verbal gaps in their idiolects.

Another of e.lockhart’s protagonists, Cady Sinclair of We Were Liars, composes an elaborate comfort code for protecting herself against the retraumatization of her PTSD flashbacks to the night that her cousins, four dogs, and boyfriend were killed in a house fire—that she set, compounding the pain. In her self-protective language, the truth about her family slowly percolates through the fairytales with which she has become preoccupied; although the reader, and Cady, come to understand that these stories are only the superficial layer of what Cady is attempting to communicate, they also serve as a very real idiolectic phenomena for compartmentalization. Cady’s comfort coding is abundant and her trauma very different from Roo’s, but the exploration of language that lockhart utilizes for both of these girls demonstrates the way that lockhart, as a writer, uses stylized language to add clarity to emotional incoherence. Roo is not willing to access her anxiety by name; Cady literally cannot face, much less name, the depth of her trauma. lockhart gives both girls, and both conditions—anxiety disorder and PTSD—respect in how she allows for their individuality to supersede the masking qualities so often associated with psychological issues. Roo tells her “Reginald” code to Doctor Z, but even Doctor Z does not use the term. It belongs to Roo alone. Likewise, Cady’s fairytales belong to herself: even though she doesn’t know what she is trying to express, she knows that it is something of her own emotional authorship.

Despite the need for such drastic compartmentalization, lockhart allows both Roo and Cady to claim ownership of their worldviews by writing their narratives with rich, thoughtful, individual voices.

Jaclyn Moriarty’s protagonist Bindy Mackenzie in The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie also uses comfort coding for emotional compartmentalization; like Min Green, she has a clear passion outlined in the text. Bindy Mackenzie’s passion is words. Her idiolect is a perfect encapsulation of the way that internal language both creates and is created by the world around each of us: her affinity for old books and sesquipedalian tendencies affect her relationships with everyone around her, but she only knows how to analyze and measure those effects in her peculiar, individualized style of thought and speech.

3:12 p.m.

Secretly, I admit, I find many of my classmates annoying. I’ve often thought to myself, “Good grief, these people are five-year-olds. Why must I spend my days amongst them?” But have I ever said such things aloud? No. I have been nothing but generous to them, and have kept these thoughts to myself.

And how have they repaid me? Have they been grateful or kind? Ho NO. 3:14 p.m.

They have leapt at the chance to attack me! Perhaps the following crossed their minds: “Here is a sheet of paper with Bindy’s name in the center. Shall we write something complimentary?” But the answer came at once: “Why no, let us write vicious comments! Let us be the Venomous Seven! What do we care for her feelings?” (11)

The structure of Moriarty’s novel gives her the space to create an idiolect for Bindy with breadth that would be very difficult for many stories, but it serves to make Murder a clear example of what an authorially-created idiolect for a narrating protagonist can look like and the depth and scope of the character’s life that can feed into creating their language. It is, in some ways, a perfect “teaching tool” for created idiolect and its effects on characterization, and vice-versa, because within the pages of The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, we also get “Bindy Mackenzie: A Life.”

The following Life has been prepared by me (Belinda “Bindy” Mackenzie) for the purposes of a course entitled “Friendship and Development.”

…[S]ections (1) and (2) of this Life are written in straightforward narrative. They describe my early years to the best of my recollection.

However, good news!

I do have my special box with me. This is a box that contains my old diaries and a few other select items that are precious to me, such as merit awards, prizes, and copies of correspondence with the Ashbury school principal.

Hence, sections (3) to (12) of this Life will be made up of the contents of my special box (along with explanatory notes). (179)

For 61 pages, Moriarty steeps both the reader, and Bindy herself, in sixteen years of Bindy’s life story and the memories, moments, and most of all words that meshed together, tangled with each other, conflicted in meaning and intent, and created her worldview. Starting with her earliest childhood memories, such as “when I was four, [I said], ‘That house looks crestfallen’… I remember the preschool teacher saying to my mother, in some awe, ‘Is she like this at home?’” (182), Moriarty makes it clear that Bindy’s life has been built by the access she has to language.

Bindy’s loquaciousness outstripping her psychological development, coupled with her father’s domineering and somewhat misanthropic influence, create an idiolect that underserves Bindy for explaining emotional and social phenomena. She has more facility with academic language, and she relies on that almost as a crutch: “Although I tried to help, I thought my classmates were ‘teen monsters’… No wonder my classmates have not liked me! And no wonder I exploded into ruthlessness this year. I thought I was surrounded by monsters… And yet, in my distant past, I had loved my classmates. I thought that they were beautiful” (244-245). The origin idea of the “teen monster” is illustrated through her fondness for nineteenth- and early-twentieth century etiquette books; Bindy expresses in her first FAD class that the idea of a “teenager” is a modern marketing construction and she is, in many ways, technically correct, but that idea has been reinforced in her by her infatuation with an era when sociologically, teenagers were just younger adults. At home, too, where her father requires “business proposals” before giving his children pocket money, where Bindy holds multiple jobs, and where she has taken on a role of mediator between parents in the midst of separation, her idea of being a small adult, rather than what she perceives as a “teen,” is justified by Moriarty. The plot, the characterization, and the voice used to express both work together to flesh out Bindy as a complete person—a, yes, teenager, with a past and a future.

In the past-tense writings of Bindy’s Life passages, which Moriarty writes as culled from Bindy’s former diaries, there is a recognizable structure to the sentences. Like Min Green, Bindy’s thoughts race across the page in multiclausal sentences and run-ons. She puts herself first, as the subject of nearly every sentence, but it never reads as simplistic. Bindy also occasionally tends towards fragments, but in Moriarty’s linguistically skilled pen, these cut-off thoughts have their own flow. They add texture as they show that Bindy’s lightspeed thoughts have suddenly skittered to a stop: Bindy has reached a concept that, in her existing idiolect, she cannot name. At all ages, Bindy has having a similar racing pattern to their her thoughts, a similar range of impressive vocabulary, and a tendency towards attempting prescriptive formality without actually understanding all of its components or rules—Bindy, even at age nine, is a very smart girl who reads formal, old-fashioned texts, and tries to mimic their language, but does not always succeed. At age nine, she ponders whether James Joyce’s Ulysses might have benefitted from a good editor (194), which is absolutely true, but she also interprets and cites a childlike, faulty interpretation of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as she relates the philosophical concept of negative capability and mortal transience to the end of a chocolate-themed birthday party.

Now, two hours later, back home again, I have the strangest feeling. I can’t describe it. I guess I feel sad that the party’s over. I feel tired and confused and cranky. I wonder if I’ll ever have such fun again? I mean, it just seemed to work so beautifully—could that party, that chocolate game, have been the high point of my life? Is it all downhill from here?

I think Keats put it best when he wrote:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as thought of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.

(194)

Further, the language that ‘Bindy’ (really, Moriarty) uses in the Life passages when she was younger and thought her classmates were beautiful is different from the rest of the present-day narrative mainly in its concern for explaining emotion, rather than dampening them. Present-day Bindy places emotions and concepts she finds counter to academic, and therefore life, success into boxes, protecting the rest of her words from them:

But I encountered my downfall again:

reverie

(36)

Everything that is not directly correlated to academic success is, to present-day Bindy, “reverie.” Notably, she considers thinking about her current living situation, her emotional state, and her larger place in the world to be “reverie,” insignificant as daydreams. As the reader, and Bindy, explore the way her parents raised her and the treatment that she receives from her classmates and teachers, Bindy slowly stops finding her own well-being to be something that must be contained away from her other concerns.

Moriarty allows the length of the book to build from that static, stifled worldview into a broader idea of success, a richer idea of what is worthwhile, as Bindy first alienates and then wins back her classmates’ friendship, experiences rule-breaking and new experiences, and looks back with honest assessment at the person she used to be and what led her to where she is. With Bindy, the reader realizes that internalizing phrases like “Bindy… hold onto the idea that you are Number One. Those other kids? Nothing” (203) affected the access that Bindy had to language to describe her classmates as people. As something other than ‘nothing.’ And that, in turn, informed her perspective of all of their shared social interactions, feeding into her emotional truths. The intensely personal climax of the book comes when Bindy makes this realization for herself:

A mystical thing just happened and I must type quickly to know if it is real.

Very well. (Calm my breathing.) Here it is:

…Astrid apologized.

That stone of resentment that I carry around in my heart: should it now fizz and dissolve?

But can I let it go?

I think I’ve been trying to do that all term. I think that’s why I’ve been wanting to talk to Try about my Life. I wanted her to ask me about that cataclysmic episode in Year 8 [when Astrid nicknamed Bindy “Booger Mackenzie”]. It’s all there, hinted at in my Life…

I think about the “name” that Astrid gave me in Hill End—the name that they called me for most of Year 8. I can never write it down.

I forgot who I was that year.

Astrid chose my name for me.

I think of Ernst von Schmerz and how, at his old school, they would not let him choose his name. So now he chooses over and over, to defy them… Why did I let [Astrid] choose my name that year?

…I think of names, and of choosing who you want to be. (430-432)

Moriarty layers questions of identity, friendship, sexual awakening, mentorship, responsibility, and family into a plot that is, at face value, a murder mystery, as the title of the novel suggests. By utilizing multimodality and intertextuality, by allowing Bindy to both insert her own past-self’s thoughts and words, and the words of those who inspire her, into the text, Moriarty is able to show clearly how Bindy’s idiolect, and worldview, came to be. She lets all of the influences that play a role shaping her life experience speak in their own voices, and allows the reader to watch as those voices are integrated into Bindy’s voice.

And yet: Moriarty lets Bindy lead. She is absolutely the agent of the story; she drives the book, and her Life, to every place they go, every scene, and every sentence. And she knows it. And when she doesn’t know it, it is because Moriarty is giving Bindy space on the page to learn what is driving her, driving the scene, driving her Life.

When I was in high school, and even into college, I did not feel like I was in the driver’s seat of my life. One of the deepest pains that I remember feeling as a teenager was the sense of being stuck: stuck in my high school, stuck in my small town, stuck with the perceptions of others defining me, stuck being silenced by the adults around me, stuck being looked down on for the things that gave me life. Stuck worrying that despite my passion for writing, I would never command language with the efficiency of the great male novelists we read in AP English; stuck defending my principles and defenses for the interpretations of their books as meaningless to me because the lives they spun, of bullfighters and soldiers and ennui, were experiences that I could never have. Stuck, when I arrived home, being so far away from all of the other girls whose experiences I did share, who I could only communicate with through a computer. Stuck being ignored and laughed at when I tried to explain that the feelings we talked about together were real, even though we knew deep down that the boys we felt them for were not.

The desire to become unstuck made everything feel desperate. It was desperately important to convince that teacher about this essay topic, it was desperately important to know everything about that boy band, it was desperately important to leave this town. It was desperately important to master the capabilities of language.

The sense that I must be using words wrong gnawed at me.

The blankness that I felt in reading The Lord of the Flies was placed at cultural odds with the welling of emotion that Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series brought up in me; the lyrics of my boy bands and girl groups made me feel like I wasn’t alone, but they were “about nothing,” according to my dad and my elder cousin and the reviewers in the newspaper. Being a teenage girl was a catch-22 of passionately loving all of the things that were designed for me, marketed to me, meant for me, and then being called stupid for loving them. Sure, boy bands might be “well-oiled money machines” (Garland) and YA literature sometimes has covers that are, like, pink, or have cupcakes on them, or sometimes even pink cupcakes, but they enriched my experience as a teenager. They informed my idiolect.

And so did all of the things that I was accused of being for loving them.

It’s hard not to remember being called a “rabid, knicker-wetting banshee who will tear off her own ears in hysterical fervor,” as Jonathan Heaf, a columnist for GQ—a magazine for adult men—proudly labeled teenage girls who, like, enjoy music wrong. It is a cultural baggage of women to be expected to shed ten years of being called maudlin, melodramatic, hysterical, gullible, unrelateable, unreasonable, unlikable, vapid, shallow, ugly, snobbish, cliquish, silly, prudish, slutty, dumb, bland, weird, dirty, worthless—just in time to be subject to editorials asking why women devalue themselves at work, why women insist on “sad desk salads” when the men of the office go out for Chipotle, why so many female vocal tics sound to male ears like questioning, like a lack in confidence. Why women and girls speaking at all sound, to harken back to Slate’s Lexicon Valley, obnoxious.

It’s because mainstream media and adult culture as a whole conspire to make sure that teenage girls are punished for daring to admit their messy, striated, flesh-blood-and-bone humanity. There is very little that mainstream mass media hates more than a young woman who is too complex to pigeonhole. And so all of these things that teenage girls love, these things that they do, are simplified to the point that people without access to their realities can go, well yeah, that does seem pretty dumb.

If someone is not there to watch One Direction fans debate the merits of the band’s five years balancing public personae with private lives within the Panopticon and whether as a whole that has been unhealthy for their fans (Sashayed), it’s easy to focus on lyrics like “We’re like na, na, na/And then we’re like yeah, yeah, yeah” (One Direction).

If one were to rely on mass media coverage of young adult novels to understand their breadth and depth, then it would seem like vampires with cancer at the end of the world are truly the concern of teenage readers today; and, of course, that it is up to white men to save the category. Which would be erroneously referred to as a genre. The books that address the unpretty, too-real parts of teen girl life like All the Rage; books that give power to whole swaths of girls ignored by other media, like Fat Angie and Gabi, A Girl in Pieces; books that question, with a cutting incisiveness, the role of media in the continued victimization of women, like Infandous—

And I wonder about that—about taking pleasure from these women’s pain. Of course they’re not real—they’re mythological—they’re pretend, but whatever. It’s only because real women were raped and real men raped that any of this makes a connection for people. All around me people look and point and discuss, faces neutral or lit up in delight. Their pain, our pleasure. I wonder—does that make us complicit? Guilty by association? (117)

these disappear. Instead, it is easier for cultural digestion to believe that “YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way” (Graham). Because teenagers, particularly those who populate so many YA pages with their silly hysterical girlishness, must be fundamentally uncritical people.

At best, adolescent girls are seen as experimental organisms waving all limbs frantically as they crawl towards finding a self to become in adulthood; at worst, they are “dark-pink oilslick[s] that howl and moan and undulate” in hysterical nothingness, “pleading white-eye[d]” and desperate (Heaf)[11] for any older (male) person to come along and teach them how life works. In either case, they are vessels to be filled with societal expectations. They are given no latitude for vices, virtues, or voices.

In short: we have created, and all live in, a culture where teenage girls are almost never allowed to be whole.

In 2011, the Wall Street Journal published one of their biannual attack-on-YA articles, a piece by longtime reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon that argued that young adult literature had lost its right to a place of importance in teen lives because it had become “too dark.” Gurdon fretted that frank discussions of real-life issues or speculative fiction takes on deep universal fears, such as in the then-popular dystopian scifi trend, would endanger teens’ “happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart” (Gurdon). In response, author Maureen Johnson started the Twitter hashtag #YAsaves, inviting a tribute to the way that honestly reflective, empathetic YA novels can provide life-saving connections for readers who are, like so many teens, stuck. One of the most poignant messages out of over 15,000 tweeted is short, even for Twitter, and simple: “#YAsaves but silence kills” (Johnson).

Tackling realistic, reflective subject matter is of vital importance, but of equal weight and gravity is the way that young adult novels can give this subject matter connective voice. A protagonist whose experience is as uncommon as lockhart’s Frankie Landau-Banks’—because I have to say that I don’t think many of us were clandestinely leading secret societies in high-income boarding schools in our teens—can be rendered with accessible, touching language when the author cares enough to allow their protagonist to be teenaged. Which means: to innovate language, to encode their meaning in layers of steganography, to speak outside of the system. To be whole.

That is the greatest benefit of striving to create an idiolect for a narrating protagonist: the ability to imbue them with dynamism. Min Green is infinitely more dynamic than Katniss Everdeen despite existing for two fewer books and, really, like the biggest hardship in Min’s life is a breakup and Katniss is literally leading an apocalyptic civil war. But Min’s growth is dynamic and organic, while Katniss’ is spurred only by external forces and shown in action.

Min’s voice does not let the reader ignore the way she absorbs information like a sponge, from the taste of Jean’s spiced pistachios and the pity they hint at as Jean tries to silently warn her of Ed’s impending unfaithfulness to the wayward sympathy of her own bully when it transpires that, in the end, they have both been played the same way. Katniss, even accounting for differences in personality and in upbringing, is afforded the space to relate only the minimum information for readers to follow the story: she is less participating narrator than camera lens, guiding the reader’s eye. Her voice, like her position as a mere figurehead by the final events of Mockingjay, denies her agency: she is a static symbol, a puppet of Collins’ story to tell.

In contrast, Min, even as she questions her own judgment, never loses her sense of self-determination and agency. She thinks, and she feels, and she acts, even when she wishes she did not. Despite being a fictional character, the voice that Handler creates for Min allows for Why We Broke Up to read like it is truly her story.

Bindy Mackenzie, too, is in control of her own story: she seizes control of her life with fervor when it becomes clear to her that for too long, the words of others have limited her. Jaclyn Moriarty builds a life into Bindy’s voice, and a voice from that life. They are inextricable, and they force the reader to confront Bindy’s messy, mean, judgmental qualities on par with her soft heart and idealistic dreams. She is not a character who can be minimized into one dimension.

e.lockhart is one of the authors who consistently gives her protagonists and narrators range, and as a result, strikes a reverberant chord with her readers. The languages of Frankie, of Roo, of Cady, of Gretchen, are all drastically individuated; they are not how any existing teenager speaks—but that makes them accurate and sensitive portrayals of each of these characters. lockhart does not attempt mimicry of teenage voices that she encounters; she, like those teens themselves, creates voice from context. She does her readers the service of refusing to condescend to them with false equivalencies or bad copies of TV slang, and she does her characters the service of considering their upbringing, their culture, their interests, and their fears when she determines what words mean for them. She affords her characters respect. And, in consequence, this shows respect for all of the teenage girls who are working to process the same emotions and problems. Who are working to become unstuck.

Linguist, feminist, and Oxford professor Deborah Cameron urges that descriptivist language is one of the key elements that must be accepted in order for a person to start to defeat ingrained misogyny and ageism. She warns that “[the] patriarchy is inventive... Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run [industry] is doing the patriarchy’s work for it” (Cameron). Too many arguments for the differences between “good YA” and “bad YA” rely on this same axiomatic preference for adult, white, male language, and assume that books that reinterpret the young female experience into this prescriptivism must be somehow “worthier.”

Actually, though, for all of the times that authors who write first-person narratives in which teenage, female protagonists sound—or even aspire to sound—like adult men are praised for their denial or reversal of the idiolectic patois of teenage girls’ thoughts, we are teaching our young female readers that their forms of self-expression are lesser. And that to succeed, they should conform. Conform their feelings, conform their perceptions, conform to becoming a static symbol rather than a whole and deep person. Handler, lockhart, and Moriarty refuse to do the patriarchy’s bidding in regard to their characters. Min, Roo, and Bindy are all intelligent girls, they are all emotionally volatile girls, they are all vulnerable girls, and they are all girls who control their own stories. They make choices and defend them. They express themselves, they grow, they feel, and they are whole. Through their attention to syntax, individualized references, and stylized descriptivist language, Handler, lockhart, and Moriarty create authentic teenage voices.

Min Green loves film, and she thinks in long, sweeping pans of her mental camera: Daniel Handler does justice to her when he writes Why We Broke Up in tumbling run-on sentences that vacillate between a faraway lens and tight close-ups. Min is ostensibly writing the epistolary novel as a Dear John letter to her ex, Ed Slaterton, but Handler navigates the way for the reader so that we can all understand, and empathize with, Min’s inside jokes and esoteric references. We can see, from inside her head, the flickers of the movies that Ed never understood—and so we understand, in a way that he can’t, why they broke up.

Roo Oliver of The Boyfriend List is in the process of fighting tooth and nail to reclaim dominion over her own emotional reactions, and as such, her voice is deliberately controlled, but belies her with circuitousness. She tells us how she feels, and then doubles back in her footnotes to say, no, I actually feel this way, in the end. e.lockhart grows Roo’s idiolect over the course of her four books, as well, so that the shared slang of her former friends falls away as she forges a new life without them and has the strength of self to rely on her own words.

Bindy Mackenzie loves words—and she hates many of the things that she is (teenage, anxious, unliked, misunderstood, imperfect). The way that Jaclyn Moriarty balances Bindy’s facility with language for her mistrust of her own viewpoint, especially as The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie unfolds, gives credence to her feelings even as they change wildly over the course of one school year. By allowing the reader full access to Bindy as a whole person, this change shows growth and feels natural.

An idiolect is made all of the elements of life that knot together to expose them to these words, this syntax, that coping mechanism. Daniel Handler, e.lockhart, and Jaclyn Moriarty each allow their protagonist’s essential passions, fears, and upbringing to inform their perceptions of the world and let that perception feed into the access each narrator has to understanding her place in her relationships, school, family, and life. Even as they endeavor to learn and understand more about that place, and often to fight against the preconceptions that place creates about them in others, they have the agency to control the way their story is told. For protagonists who are adolescent girls, and for readers who are girls and women, acknowledgment of their control and ownership over their language—and their story—is both authentic and imperative: it respects the heritage of teenage girls as linguistic innovators, societal changers, hierarchy-topplers. It is a way to give dignity to the need to speak outside of the system from right under its nose.

It is a sly way for these authors, this industry, to tell our readers, we hear you.

When I was in the fourth grade, my first lesson about sex and puberty was that my intelligence as a girl didn’t matter unless I learned to express it in the language of adult men. That idea has been a part of my being ever since; my idiolect is built out of words that I learned to sound more formal, more masculine, more academic, less emotional, more rational. It is built of the words that are prized for academic writing, but don’t express real ideas—or at least, cannot express my real ideas. The incompetence of the language I’d been taught to use in this context to convey the issues I wanted to share in this paper was maddening at first; it felt like AP English all over again, like I would need to hide my name and my perspective to get words on the page that could be heard. In the end, though, that would be a lie. Everything that matters to me, to the core of my being, about authenticity of voice in YA literature would be undone like a loose ball of yarn if I succumbed to the temptation to write my ideas the way a man would.

Because, of course, a man just wouldn’t write them.

The totality of experience in having been the individual teenage girl I once was—passing coded notes folded into origami boxes; learning the language of passion for an interest before needing to express passion for a significant other; discovering narratives like Meg Cabot’s effervescent, melodramatic Mia Thermopolis and Carolyn Mackler’s pensive, unsure, tentatively sexual Sammie Davis—and the cumulative impact of the way the language I had taught me about the language I could never have… that is what my understanding is made of. I can add to that well of understanding, but those aspects of who I am will always be there, and they will always play a significant role in my interpretation of the world.

My idiolect is built on all of the feelings and expressions that I have found thanks to my femaleness along the way. The lows of insults that only women receive—and the highs of communicating with other girls outside of the reach of male gaze, throwing their determination to keep us down back at them to the tune of singing “na na na” and reading excellent YA books. I surrounded myself with strong-voiced women who wrote girls speaking outside of the system, like e.lockhart and Meg Cabot and Carolyn Mackler, and bound myself to a community of girls whose existence itself is a form of steganography, our own ideals and goals and rebellion hidden inside the text of posters at concerts and fanfiction online. The woman I am today was created by all of the girls that I have been: little and afraid to speak, preteen and hiding my secrets in plain sight, teenage and outspoken but beaten down for it.

Thanks to them, I have found my voice.

Works Cited

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Cabot, Meg. The Princess Diaries. New York City: HarperTeen, 2000. Print.

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— . The Princess Diaries, vol. III: Princess in Love. New York City: HarperTeen, 2002. Print.

Cameron, Debbie. The Myth of Mars and Venus. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. ebook.

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— . Real Live Boyfriends*: yes, boyfriends, plural, if my life weren't complicated I wouldn't be Ruby Oliver. New York City, Delacorte Press, 2010. Print.

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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (The New Folger Library Shakespeare). New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.

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