Mila McWarren

This is the first book I've ever finished and published, but it's not the first time I've ever tried to write a book. When you're a proper adult and have had computers for a long time, you end up carrying around these archives of every stupid Word document you've ever thought was worth saving for even five minutes, hidden there inside "/Old Hard Drives/Blue Laptop Hard Drive/First Laptop Hard Drive 1997 Archive/Book Ideas", and so if you dig long enough you can get really embarrassed really fast.

Every single one of those book ideas would have been considered New Adult. Not a single one of those books ever made it far out of outlining but I think that has more to do with me than anything else. I mean, it did cross my mind that the thing I was trying to do was really different than most of what was on the market – some of these ideas were even from before YA was the crowded field it now is – and I do remember thinking, "wait, maybe books like this aren't a thing for a REASON."

So that's why I'm not that surprised that it's a little bit marginal as a genre; I had sort of figured that out on my own, back when I was trying to write a book about a girl who was a recent college graduate and starts having these experiences that are pretty much ripped out of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods". (Look it seemed like a good idea at the time. The idea was that she moved and started having all these new experiences and part of the issue is how much of those experiences are about difficulty in this life transition and how much was about this other weird experience she was having and, really, it was a story about place, which should surprise none of you who have known me long.)

But I will always be surprised, at least a little, that there aren't more books about this life stage. There totally should be. Here is why.

So, first of all: consider the standard coming-of-age story. The prime example of the form, at least for American audiences, is Catcher in the Rye, which tells the story of one weekend of Holden Caulfield's life. Holden is 17 at the time. A less literary, more familiar example of the form are the Harry Potter novels; those stories are about Harry's adventures, trials, and tribulations ages 11-17.

In fact, if you take a look at it, most of the coming-of-age stories we know best are about people of high school age in the United States. Maybe it's because I'm so old, or maybe it's because I have a teenaged son, or maybe it's because I'm a social scientist, but for whatever reason, I am side-eyeing that pretty hard. 17 is when we emotionally transition into adulthood, really? Have you spoken to your average 17-year-old guy recently? (Because that's another thing about coming-of-age books: they're almost always The Story of the Artist As A Young Man.)

The legal age of majority ranges between 18 and 21 in most countries, but do any of us really think that that's when adulthood actually begins for most young people? The New York Times doesn't, which is good, because most social science doesn't, either. In a lot of social science right now, it's 25+ that gets you into the "adult" bracket for analyses of family, education, marriage, economics – pretty much all the big social institutions.

17 isn't what it used to be. People get married at 18, sure, but it's far from the norm, and that hasn't been a norm in the US for a very long time.

So, fine, adulthood is delayed and adolescence is extended, and people are still really growing up and struggling into independence well into their 20s. There's not a damn thing wrong with that, but I do think it's important to keep in mind that this transition to adulthood is happening in bodies that are fully adult, and it now happens with a much broader range of life experiences already intact. I think this is a wonderful thing – read the NYT article, seriously, there's good stuff in there, because this is a good and hopeful story about actually taking the world seriously instead of being judgey about it – but I also think that it means that there are new stories to be told.  

Because the 20s are a wonderful time, a really exciting formative time. When you think about the late teens as a transition to adulthood now, it's hard to see; so many young people have very strong relationships with their parents, and few of our teenagers are in boarding schools where they can just come and go at will. Pop culture critics spend a lot of time talking about the 'dead parent' trope in YA fiction, but I think it's pretty structurally important for YA right now; most contemporary parents keep their older teenagers on leashes that are at least electronic, because this is what is normal for us now.

But the 20s… by the time most people hit the early 20s, a few more things have happened. They've held jobs. They've gone to school. Maybe they're leaving school and emerging into the work world. They might have moved out, or tried to move out, or thought about moving out. A lot of them have had sex, some of them have had a lot of sex, and many have had committed relationships with sexual components. They might not be quite ready to settle down with a partner yet, but they're starting to see why a person might want to. Sometime in their late teens they probably started to realize that the world was bigger than they ever realized, but by their 20s they've started to be shoved around by that bigger world and are learning to throw a few elbows of their own. Their relationships with their parents may have started to shift a little.

At this point in history, it just feels silly to think of what happens in the teenage years as a real coming of age. This is not to deride YA; it's a wonderful genre that I'm actually itching to get my hands on. But I think the 20s just have so much promise, so much weird and wonderful change happening, and I can't believe that everybody isn't tripping over themselves to write stories about the weird shit that happens during this decade of life. It's my favorite.

So yeah. The Luckiest is New Adult Romance. Nik and Aaron are both recent college graduates, and when they come home for this wedding they’re both wearing their new experiences and seeing the world a little different because of them. It’s the only thing that lets their love story move forward again. New Adult – I think it's a cool place to be.