Brave new worlds

I was a book girl – a follower of Jo March and Jane Eyre and Daria Morgendorffer and Lisa Simpson. So when I was young, there was a lot of time spent in the library. Sometimes these visits meant actual reading (ideally in a nice peaceful nook with a bag of penny sweets for company.) Sometimes they meant strolling between the shelves without any clear direction in mind, browsing and sampling. Bookcasing the joint, you might say. 

I was looking for a lot of things. I wanted fantasy and adventure. New worlds, because mine felt terribly mundane. I also wanted to see myself. It was a mixture of finding and building. There were people in the books who were like me, and there were people in books who I wanted to be like. Every so often there would be a spark of affinity. Here I am. 

When I was twelve it was Sherlock Holmes. I wanted interesting things to happen to me – I wanted a nemesis – and I wanted to be the cleverest person in the room. Holmes made no apology for his eccentricities. He didn’t have many friends, but he didn’t care. When a book person (or a story person of any kind) is yours, their grievances become your grievances, their wins become your wins. Petrova Fossil from Ballet Shoes was one of mine. I kept tabs on the birthday and Christmas presents she receives in the novel because it felt like these things were coming to me, too. Love seemed like another kind of present. It was the author’s seal of approval, it often came as a reward. If a character found love at the end of their story then they had learned all the right lessons. Love made you worthwhile and important – it was the sort of thing that happened to the hero.

People can be disparaging about escapism. But leaving the ‘real world’ behind for a time can make novels bolder

Not everyone gets to be the hero. Certainly not in my world, in those days. In school changing rooms, where girls would shriek "Don’t look!" before undressing, lesbians were a lurking danger. Bisexuals and asexuals were non-existent. There was one right way to be – and for the wrong ways there were either bad words or no words at all.

The library was almost as limited. I got good at tilting my head slightly, mentally re-tailoring stories to make them fit better. This was familiar, I would think – almost. There was Jo from Jean Ure’s Jam Today – her friends tell her that her crush on a school prefect is just a "pash" – but what if it isn’t? I re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray and adopted Basil and his hopeless adoration of Dorian. I turned back to Holmes and Watson. 

Later, I found another remedy. I think writing should be cultivated like music or cookery because, like these skills, it lets you feed yourself exactly what you’re craving. If you want brownies or Bach then you can have them. I can’t reliably produce either of those things but I can write books, and a couple of years ago I began a novel called Small Angels. One part of it was a story I had wanted to read for a while and never quite found, a particular romance between two passionate and complicated women. 

I still think there’s no harm in being able to look at a story slantways – to see the shadows it casts. Sometimes those shadows (the fictional roads not taken, the paths the writer is too oblivious or timid or rule-bound to take) are more interesting than the authorised version. Sometimes we deserve better than the story we’re given. But there are alternatives now. Things have changed since my penny sweet days. I saw it clearly this June, walking past bookshops with Pride displays in the windows. There were rows of bright enticing paperbacks, I Kissed Shara Wheeler and The Song of Achilles and Heartstopper amongst many others. The covers, lined up together like this, made a lovely display. The change is ongoing – the journey isn’t nearly finished – but at least we’ve begun. Standing outside the bookshop, it struck me how much richer Young Adult fiction has grown over the past two decades. Queer fantasy has blossomed, too – look at T Kingfisher’s The Raven and the Reindeer, Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree. These are stories of new worlds. They’re new because we see them through the eyes of teenage characters still finding and building themselves. Or they’re new because the worlds themselves are strange. We escape ourselves when we read them. 

People can be disparaging about escapism. But leaving the "real world" behind for a time can make novels bolder. I think it’s small wonder that these kinds of fictions should be so welcoming for new kinds of stories. They’re books full of possibility, they allow us to imagine alternatives. Imagine a world of chimeras and magic spells. Or – a bigger leap still – imagine a universe where you chose a different life when you were younger, and ended up an entirely different person. Imagine there’s more than one right way to be. These books were always worth reading, but now they come with less judgement attached. I’m glad about that, because I think we all need possibility. We all need reminding how to say what if. The books in the window in June showed anyone walking past that there are alternatives, many different ways to be. You can find yourself, build yourself differently, if you want. And slowly (in this way at least) our world gets brighter, word by word.