YA fiction has kick-started some important conversations for me. With topics ranging from sexuality, race and gender to mental health and terminal illnesses, it is clear that diversity is on the rise in literature. Books featuring characters from the LGBTQ+ community and racially diverse protagonists have opened my mind to worlds I never knew existed. But one aspect of society still seems to be crucially missing from contemporary YA, and that is working class characters.
In the area I live in, there is a clear divide between affluence and poverty, between the working class and upper or middle class. And that divide is spreading to literature. Think about what contemporary YA fiction you’ve read recently: chances are, the characters have a nice house and a stable household income; parents who don’t have to work weekends just to make ends meet and financial worries never cross their mind. This doesn’t reflect the real world; a world where many children and teenagers grow up below the poverty line, and hardly see their parents because they work so hard just to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their head. The world where many adolescents are coming from council estates and find their opportunities in life limited because of their postcode.
60%, according to a Daily Mail survey, of the British population self-identifies as working class – so why am I only reading and seeing books that tell the stories of the other 40%? Day after day, I am forced to actively seek out texts with working class protagonists only to find that they are either leading an uprising in some post-apocalyptic war zone (The Hunger Games), a Victorian factory worker living in a Whitechapel slum (Sue Reid’s Mill Girl) or members of a neighbourhood gang who terrorise others around them (Maria Farrer’s A Flash of Blue). It seems like the only time working class characters are focused on at length in contemporary YA are if they’re in a gang (think William Sutcliffe’s latest novel, Concentr8, which is based on the 2011 riots). Or, like Leo’s family in Lisa Williamson’s The Art of Being Normal, there is still a notion that their parents blow all their money on booze and cigarettes and the children have to beg for scraps in order to rub two pennies together. They mainly live on a council estate Up North, are living on the bread line (Catherine Bruton’s Pop!) and have parents who simply don’t care. All are instances of stereotyping which hold back a realistic representation of characters whose background and experiences may well reflect those of many readers.
I am not claiming that books with affluent characters lack diversity across the board, because they don’t. This is Not a Love Story by Keren David featured incredibly diverse characters, but they were all affluent, and to my delight, she called herself out on that within the novel. I’m not blaming authors, because I know the age old myth of ‘write what you know’; if you weren’t brought up in a working class family, it can be difficult to write a credible character or setting without it coming across as though you are trivialising or appropriating it.
But what happened to ‘read what you know’? I love expanding my literary horizons and challenging myself to read books that aren’t in the mainstream, or provoke thoughts about the society I live in but that shouldn’t be the only thing I am able to do. I should be able to go back to my roots and read something about someone or something that I can sympathise with, not just empathise, shouldn’t I? Of course, I love characters that I can relate to, but fail to comprehend how I am expected to connect with a teenage girl who has never dealt with the unemployment of a parent, whose mothers and fathers have never worked on Christmas Days and New Year’s Eves, and who haven’t missed birthdays because they were working to provide for their family. I cannot relate to a teenage girl who has never worried that maybe she won’t be able to afford to go to university or even out with her friends. I cannot relate to a teenage girl whose parent can buy her a brand new car at the drop of a hat.
You may see this as an overreaction, or ‘posh-bashing’, but I am sick and tired of this elitism in YA literature and, quite honestly, so should you.
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