Bathroom Monologue: YA Fiction Vs. OA Fiction

It finally happened when I overheard a forty-four year old man ranting at a twenty-nine year old woman that Twilight was shallow. I can handle adults reading below their level, but not them bitching about it. This jackass probably hadn’t read a Man Booker nominee in his entire life and was griping about stories explicitly marketed to Young Adults.

After that, I decided to write MA Novels. Mature Adult Novels. No, I'd write OA. Old Adult Novels. Not merely great and accessible fiction like Michael Chabon or Max Brooks put out. We’re talking crotchety, crusty, has-read-at-least-two-Dostoyevskys Fiction. Senior Citizen Fiction. If I could, I’d pass a law that you’d have to be eighty-nine years of age to purchase a copy of this thing. There’d be an eye chart, and if you read “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” at the bottom but couldn’t ballpark where it was from, then you win a copy of Hunger Games.

You’d have teenagers, Young Adults, desperately torrenting and sneaking each other copies of Senior Citizen Fiction. Grandma would pirate the e-book, not out of malice, but because she’s not sure she’ll live long enough to hit the age minimum to legally buy it. And you’ve got to have that legal age minimum, not because of the sex or violence, but because this book has an actual level of complexity intended to challenge any adult mind not buried in things explicitly written for their children.

And what I desperately wanted was to look aside from that forty-four year old man, and see his kid. She'd be at his knee, reading OA fiction on a tablet she jailbroke herself, because she's smarter than her dad. He'll still use her as the excuse for why he just had to read four of those damned books, too.