What Changes During Adolescence?

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Adolescence is furnished by uncertainty, guilt, sexual and destructive urges.

Adolescent fiction mirrors adolescent reality.

Adolescents are drawn to the eerie and upside-down.

Famed psychoanalyst Margot Waddell wrote about “the eerie and upside-down world” of adolescent fiction in her 2018 book On Adolescence.1 She observed that fiction aimed at young adults often depicts two worlds: one in which the protagonists are fully involved in ordinary adolescent life, and another, alternative version of reality, furnished by uncertainty, guilt, sexual and destructive urges and peculiar, often violent experiences that they have to survive.

Tony Tanner, writing about American teen fiction almost five decades earlier, suggested that adolescent protagonists often live in a kind of “edge-city” on the threshold between life and death; sanity and madness; thinking and mindlessness; depression and mania; intimacy and perversity; fantasy and reality; accommodation and rebellion.2

In my work with adolescents, I’m always curious about their realities and other worlds – the stuff they read, stream........

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