Jenny Han: In Defense Of Writing About The Bittersweet Teenage Years
A passion for writing from the perspective of teenagers has made JENNY HAN an acclaimed bestselling author of young-adult fiction, with books The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before securing noteworthy screen adaptations – plus, a spin-off series titled XO, Kitty. Here, Han shares the lessons she learned while revisiting the heartbreak and hope of her teenage years…
I am often asked how I, an adult, am able to write from the perspective of teenagers. Sometimes, more pointedly, I’m asked not how but why. Why write about teenagers; why focus a career, is the implication, on the emotions and desires of teenage girls? It’s not really a question worth dignifying with a response, but I thought I would try, if only because it gives me a reason to reaffirm the things I love about girlhood, about writing YA [young adult] fiction], about the captivating, bittersweet experience that is being a teenager.
As a storyteller, I’ve always been drawn to ‘firsts’ because they leave a mark. You remember your first love, your first heartbreak, the first book that really seared your soul. That’s one reason I love writing about teenage years – they’re crammed full of all-consuming firsts, with emotions so strong they reverberate through the rest of our lives. Often, people want to forget what it was like to be a teenager; a time when our emotions were so big that we felt out of control. But I think those feelings, whether they’re in your present or your past, are wildly important, because they’re helping to form the person that you will turn out to be.
Ever since I was a teenager myself, I’ve used writing to make sense of my emotions. The heartsick girl writing love letters no one was ever supposed to see and tucking them away in her hatbox for safekeeping was me, years before I created Lara Jean and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. And the feelings I poured out in those letters seem every bit as intense today as they did when I wrote them. The magnitude of those emotions, the way they don’t fade or warp with time, is one of the things that makes writing about teenage love and heartbreak so powerful. Now, I get to not only understand my own feelings through my writing, but connect with readers who might have felt the very same things. Yet another reason I love writing for teenagers is that they’re honest: they’ll tell you exactly what made them cry and laugh and squirm.
“When I look back on myself as a teenager, I feel more empathy and love than I was capable of at the time. It can be so hard to be young, but it can also be so sweet
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When I was writing To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, I knew I was channeling teenage Jenny, furiously writing love letters in her bedroom, but I didn’t realize that I was working through something I was experiencing in my own life at the same time. It wasn’t until I was at my book launch that I understood that the way Lara Jean’s family was changing in the book, as her older sister Margot leaves for college, mirrored the way my own family was changing as my baby sister got married. My sister and I have always been very close. When she got engaged, I was of course over the moon for her, but I also felt a little wistful. She and I had spent every Christmas, every birthday together, and now we would have to share her with another family and things would never be the same again. I tell you that because I think sometimes people look at teenagers experiencing big feelings and shake their heads; they say, “That’s just life.” And they’re right, that is life. Life will see you experience love and loss and heartbreak and joy in infinite combinations. But in writing the book, the lesson I was learning – that I wanted to share with my readers – is that, as an adult, your family will continue to change, and not all change is a loss. It can be beautiful, too. The next book I wrote was the sequel to To All The Boys, and it is dedicated to my sister’s first baby – my first nephew. It reads, “I’ve only just met you and already I love you.”
As an adult, you get somewhat inured to change. You know nothing is going to last forever. But teenage feelings are true and loud and honest because, when you’re young, you might not know yet that life will go on, and that time does heal most wounds – not all, but most. When I look back on myself as a teenager, I feel more empathy and love than I was capable of at the time. It can be so hard to be young, but it can also be so sweet. It’s my dearest hope that the hardness and the sweetness and the electricity and the pain come through in my books, just as they do in life.
Season 2 of The Summer I Turned Pretty is on Prime Video now