Adultier and Adultier

Young Adult, New Adult, and Regular Old Vanilla Adult

We’re all getting adultier all the time. Adultier and adultier each day, in spite of my best efforts. That’s a law of nature, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I only look like I’m aging backward, I don’t yet have the secret to actually aging backward. The secret to looking like you’re aging backward is sunscreen and snail slime. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Today’s Shelf Life is a discussion of the categories “young adult” (YA) and “new adult” (NA) in fiction: What those terms mean, what the differences are, how they relate to “adult” fiction, how to know whether what you’re writing or have written is young adult versus new adult versus plain old adult fiction, and so on.

First: What are “young adults” and a “new adults” in terms of human beings relative to their reading material? When we’re talking about who we market books to—which is different than who we write books for and who will ultimately read those books—“young adult” typically means people age 12 to age 18. That is, people who have aged out of the “middle grade” marketing demographic and not yet aged into “adult fiction.” In the publishing world, the term “young adult” refers to a person who is an adolescent, someone who is living the transitional phase between puberty and legal adulthood. 

I’m painstakingly referencing publishing because this is not necessarily the definition of an adolescent according to medical science nor other social criteria. I don’t know anything about that other stuff.

I also would like to stress legal adulthood, by which I mean age 18, because adulthood is measured by a lot of things and reaching age 18 is one of those only in a legal sense. It’s not even the only legal adulthood. After all, 18 is not old enough to buy alcohol. If there’s an age where society in which you live still considers you legally too young to partake in certain things that are reserved for people older than you, then are you legally an adult in that society? 

There’s no biological age of adulthood in humans. Humans can reach sexual maturity and reproduce before they are 10 years old, but we all agree someone that age is a child and not an adult. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which governs decision making, planning, and behavior moderation, is not fully developed in humans until age 25. But most of us would say a 24 year old person is an adult and not a child.

“New adult” refers to a marketing demographic of people who are just entering their adulthood, typically people between the ages of 18 and 25 (sometimes this is specified as 18 and 30). “Well aren’t those just adults?” Yes, legally, those folks are adults. The new adult demographic in publishing has their money (their marketing budget) staked on the concept that people just entering adulthood—those who are starting college, embarking on their first adult relationships, or might be just entering their chosen career—have a different reading profile (or book purchasing profile, at least) than adultier adults who I guess are married and have a mortgage and live in the suburbs or something.

Second: What do “young adult” and “new adult” mean in terms of fiction? I call them categories. Are they genres? No: Fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and contemporary are genres and all of the above can be written for young adults, new adults, adulty adults, or kids. But they’re not just market demographics either, because books in these categories share themes, popular tropes, settings, plots, and other commonalities that group them together beyond who they are marketed to. 

We also can’t safely group them by who likes to read them, that is, that young adults like to read young adult novels and adults like to read adult novels and so on. Lots of adults like to read YA. Lots of young adults like to read adult fiction. Lots of people who fall into the “new adult” demographic based on their age and stage would not be caught dead reading YA or NA and only read “adult” fiction.

I’m throwing out a lot of scare quotes today and it’s no accident. It’s because a lot of these words are fraught and contested and should be approached with caution. “Scare quotes” are quotation marks you put around a word or phrase that doesn’t need them (because it’s not a quote) to draw attention to or cast doubt on the term. That’s what I’m doing today. Scare quotes usually indicate poor writing, but anyway isn’t all Shelf Life poor writing?

Here is a thought exercise: A novel set in a college, the protagonist a freshman college student, all the other primary characters are college students, and any other characters we encounter are either professors, parents, or the occasional “townie” when the students venture off campus. The novel concerns itself with a year in the life of these college students, their changing relationships with one another, their studies, their classes, and their extra curricular activities together.

Is this a new adult novel based on the criteria discussed earlier in today’s Shelf Life? Yes.

Is this actually a new adult novel? No, this is The Secret History by Donna Tartt which, for some reason, is never categorized as “new adult” but always as “adult contemporary.”

Most of Jane Austen’s novels, were they written today, would be considered “new adult” fiction as they primarily follow twenty-somethings adjusting to adult society and embarking on their first adult relationships. Pride and Prejudice and Emma definitely fit the bill. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, on the other hand, is about an adult doing adult things (Gulliver is in his late 30s when he departs for his travels) but is often classed as a young adult novel.

Normally we say things like “YA and NA fiction concentrates on the things that young adults and new adults are thinking about and going through; essentially they are coming-of-age stories about finding one’s footing in the world.” But I know that’s not true or else we’d all agree that The Secret History is a new adult novel and that Gulliver’s Travels is for adults.

It’s not about the sophistication of the writing or the reading level. Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham all write at a middle-school reading level (grade levels 6 through 8), which is commensurate with the YA excerpts I pasted into the Automatic Readability Checker, such as The Golden Compass by Pullman (6th grade).

Does it have to do with who the text was written for? Who the author had in mind when they were writing? Who they visualized as the audience for their story? I feel like this is a bit closer to correct. That the audience whose interests the author hoped to serve in crafting and writing their book should direct to whom that book is eventually marketed.

At the end of the day, the labels are still helpful. Whether someone who would be classed as a “middle grade” reader (age 8 to 12) is precocious and likes to read YA fiction, or an adult (over age 25) likes to read YA fiction, that YA label is going to help them find what they’re looking for. It’s going to point them toward the shelf in the bookstore that has the stuff they want to read. In that sense, these labels are useful even if they don’t describe the demographic of the people who are necessarily reading them.

There are, however, a handful of nagging concerns I have about labeling books as YA or NA versus “adult,” which are:

1. Books written by women and femme-presenting people are disproportionately incorrectly classified as YA/NA.

2. Dividing “new adult” and “adult” books by perceived maturity level, seriousness, or “literary merit.”

3. Infantilizing adult readers with the “new adult” category when, actually, there are many different stages of adulthood and we don’t divide them into different reading categories.

First item is a well-documented phenomenon in the fantasy genre and may also (probably) affect other genres (like romance) that I’m not as familiar with. The issue is that fantasy novels written for adults but which have women or femme main characters and women or femme-presenting authors—and particularly if there is a romantic aspect—are often classified as “young adult” or “new adult” fiction even if they don’t have any of the hallmarks of YA or NA. This happens frequently but off the top of my head I can cite The Mask of Mirrors by MA Carrick, which was incorrectly shelved and reviewed as YA by a number of outlets even though it is adult high fantasy.

If I had to guess at a logical reason why this is done—and I do—I’d say it’s to try to capture sales from the YA readership, which is very large. However, this is bad for the book, the series, and the authors over time because if your book is not YA, and you advertise it as YA, and someone reads it because they like YA, they are going to be disappointed in your book because it’s not what they were expecting to read.

Second item, which goes together with the argument I’m building about the first item, is a problem because of the persistent idea that if something meets arbitrary standards of great literature it can be allowed to transcend genre and classification to join the “literary” canon unbeholden to its roots. A great example is Margaret “it’s not science fiction it’s speculative fiction” Atwood, whose Oryx and Crake is never considered YA or NA lit even though it follows two schoolboys growing up together through their new adulthood in which they bring about the apocalypse.

It just makes me really salty when as an industry and a society we look down on genre fiction and YA and NA fiction as moneymaking but ultimately not “important literature” but only because if something from genre does meet our criteria for “important literature” then we pretend it’s not genre literature. This creates a two-tier system where there important works of literature first and then important works within their genre second, but we rarely look at our important works of literature and acknowledge that they often are genre fiction. 

Third, it seems disingenuous to me that “new adulthood” is stripped out of “general adulthood” and set aside as its own category when we don’t do that for other adult life stages. We don’t have a separate category for elderly adulthood or midlife adulthood. Setting aside NA as a separate, distinct category of adulthood feels like infantilizing (as I said above) adult readers by grouping together content that interests them and setting it apart from other things we consider of interest to “adults.” It’s got that “well sure you’re an adult for taxation purposes but we obviously don’t think you’re fully mature” vibe.

I don’t think that’s the intention. I think the intention is to capture the YA demographic as they age out and funnel them right into a different marketing block. 

I also think the existence of NA as a demographic acknowledges that, as society itself matures and our understanding of human development expands, we have to adjust our definition of “adult.” As I said above, turning 18 is only one of many markers of adulthood, and it’s a legal rather than a socially or biologically meaningful one. Federal child labor law in the United States isn’t even 100 years old. Child marriage (a marriage in which at least one party is under 18 years old) is still legal in all but 7 US states but over the last 5 years many of the other 43 have begun revising and improving those laws. 

Whether you’re writing YA, NA, or plain old vanilla-flavored adult fiction, make sure you understand who you’re writing for and whose interests you’re exploring so you can make sure your book lands on the right shelf (or virtual shelf) in the store where the right people can find it. If you are a woman or a femme-presenting person and you’re not writing YA/NA, don’t let anybody put you on the wrong shelf.

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