Crossing Categories
Crossing Categories
Of the two main protagonists in my novel, Everybody Here is Kin, one is thirteen. Lucille is marooned on a barrier island while her mother leaves her minding her two step-siblings, seven and five. The other is a misanthropic veteran of thirty. Will has marooned himself, and, alone, he manages the only motel on Boneyard Island.
As a novelist, I lived with many voices, and winnowed them to Lucille’s and Will’s. Lucille’s entered my imagination first. I saw her, a Midwestern girl on the cusp of adulthood contemplating the ocean—its frightening power, its capacity to devour whatever lay in its path. Her plight as the eldest daughter may be familiar to adolescent girls whose single parents work, by necessity, leaving the older sibling responsible for the younger ones.
When I devoted myself to Lucille and Will, I didn’t know that Lucille’s voice could signal my book as possibly difficult to “categorize.” My fellow workshoppers asked, “Is this a Young Adult novel?”
An independent press liked what might be called the blurred genre, and offered publication. But dozens of other queries went unanswered, even by form letter. That’s not unusual, but occasionally the “young adult” comment cropped up, despite my description of the book’s essence: two human beings of contrasting backgrounds, ages, genders, “coming of age” in dramatically different ways.
I crafted Lucille’s voice—fresh, sassy, and unfiltered. The voices of the misanthrope and bossy thirteen-year-old complement and play off each other: Lucille’s got middle-school attitude yet her naïveté and insecurity bleed through, and shine against Will’s fear-driven façade of grumpiness. Here are Lucille’s panicked thoughts, on page 33, after her mother goes AWOL: My feet tingled. Sprints. Miles. I couldn’t dump Jack and Mayzie while I ran. Too many beach oddballs. Queen roaming the beach monitoring turtles and trash, all for the good, sure, but normal? No. And Will? The hermit with no face? . . . I knew zip about the guy. He looked like old pictures I’d seen of that Unabomber dude, but that was just the beard. He was fine, right?
Had Lucille’s adolescent voice put off the busy agents’ first readers?
Book categories help booksellers sell books, and crossing categories may sell even more books. Still, dozens of online articles guide authors on how to categorize books for maximum sales.
My novel fits the YA profile. Young adult novels traditionally have at least one character between the age of thirteen and nineteen, as Kin does. Adult novel characters are typically older than twenty. Kin also meets that criterion. While Kin’s storyline is adult, even with its disappearing, addicted mother who abandons her children, it also works as YA, which increasingly takes on difficult subject matter.
As I drafted, re-drafted, and workshopped the novel, readers, including experienced novelists, kept asking the “Young Adult” question. I thought briefly of marketing the novel as YA, but Lucille’s original voice is quite adult. Given the immediacy of the two narrative voices, Will’s PTSD, Lucille’s obsession with climate change, her grief for her father, who died in the Iraq War, I couldn’t shake my original commitment to the book as an adult read.
Elder daughters miss out on childhood when forced to become “adults” too soon. Likewise, Will was barely eighteen when he joined the Army. He is now thirty, yet remains shell-shocked, metaphorically, maybe for life.
No adult could have pierced Will’s armor like Lucille. By page 64, he understands: He’d sculpted half-starts before summer crowds hit the island, before these kids worked their way under his skin. He set the kids’ carvings aside, keeping them safe till they return.
Lucille and Will are both too young and too old for their respective ages. Lucille unwittingly seeks the parenting she desperately needs; Will gradually assumes the responsibility he has fled since mustering out of the Army.
Young people nowadays confront unthinkable family circumstances. Esch, in the adult novel, Salvage the Bones, is fifteen, motherless, pregnant, and living in “The Pit,” her family’s home ground. Even after Hurricane Katrina upends their lives, she stays strong and determined.
More books that cross genres categories may lie in our future, as young adults cope with adult problems at earlier ages, and as the online book marketplace expands. A “New Adult” literature, dominated by romance, was spawned after a 2009 St. Martin’s press contest; this new category extends the YA category beyond college—to age 30.
My characters in Kin “became” more themselves as the novel unfolded; as a novelist I was their guardian, but they told me what to do. I’d have been shocked if they put up with me arbitrarily altering ages and trajectories to fit a particular category, but if they pop up in the YA section of a library or bookstore, who am I to complain? Such genre-blurring may be inevitable, and profitable, to authors and publishers.
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BettyJoyce Nash‘s first novel, Everybody Here is Kin, debuted Sept. 24, 2023. Her story, “The Forever Project,” appears in Reckon Review; essays and stories have aired on NPR, appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Broad River Review, Across the Margin, and elsewhere.
She also writes editorials for Carolina Commentary. A MacDowell fellow in 2013, BettyJoyce won the Fitzgerald prize in 2015. Her MSJ is from Medill Journalism (Northwestern); her MFA in fiction, from Queens University of Charlotte. Her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA-France. She teaches fiction at WriterHouse in Charlottesville; she’s also taught writing at the University of Richmond and the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
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EVERYBODY HERE IS KIN
On Boneyard Island, Georgia, where everyone’s weirdly kin, 13-year-old Lucille is marooned when her mother goes AWOL with an old flame, leaving Lucille with only her father’s ashes, two half-siblings, and Will, the misanthropic manager of the island’s only motel. The abandonment kills hope of Lucille’s promised snorkeling trip to the Florida Reef before ocean heat kills the coral and illusions she’s harbored about her mother’s sanity. Everybody Here Is Kin explores the lives of this sinking family, the island community, and fears of exposing wounds, old and new, when natural disaster forces them to trust, and depend on, strangers.
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Category: On Writing
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