How I Live Now Lecture

1. How I Live Now Lecture • “I wanted readers to know what it was like to live through a war because I wanted them to get past the ‘over there’ syndrome. There's such a tendency to look at people who aren't like you and think they don't suffer the way you do. The best letter I received was from a girl who said, ‘Your book made me realize what it was like to live in a country where there's war.’ That's exactly what I set out to do.” Meg Rosoff

2. Key Points • Putting Daisy and Edmond’s Relationship into Cultural Context • The Concept of Resilience in Children’s and YA Literature • The Normative Center

3. Cultural Context • While the US and the UK share many cultural similarities, definitions of acceptable marriage practices differ. In the UK (as in many US states), it is legal to marry a first or second cousin. • Beyond legality, though, is cultural acceptance, and in the UK, cousin marriage has certainly been debated, but is not viewed with quite the hostility that it is in many sectors of the US population. • Ten percent of all marriages worldwide are cousin marriages.

4. Rosoff’s Stated Intent • BKL: Were you surprised at how well the book was received in the U.S.? • ROSOFF: I was told the cousins' relationship might be problematic. That hadn't even occurred to me because I didn't see it as incest. Here, it wasn't even mentioned in the reviews. • By “here,” Rosoff is referring to the UK. Italics mine.

5. Resilience in YA Literature • Critic Gail Murray suggests: • “[A] new construction of childhood emerged during the 1960s…. It recognized that children could not always be protected from the dangers and sorrows of real life; they might be better prepared to cope with pain if adults did not try to protect them from it.… The boundaries that had protected children and adolescents from adult responsibilities throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century became much more permeable.… Such previously defined adult issues as sexuality and suffering entered the realm of childhood.”

6. Children’s and YA Literature & War • On May 1st 2004, at Froebel College, Roehampton, in partnership with NCRCL*, Action for Children’s Arts ran an Inspiration Day entitled Children’s Literature and War. • The main speakers were the Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo, Elizabeth Laird, Michael Foreman, Charles Way - all prize winning writers who have written fictional stories set against a background of war; academic Geoff Fox; and special guest Philip Pullman. *National Center for Research in Children’s Literature

7. Conclusions of the Conference Participants • Children deserve psychological depth in the depiction of war - they need to see and understand the enemy as human. • Fiction acts as a bridge between the fantasy of warfare (as for example in the filmed battle scenes of the Lord of the Rings) and the brutal reality of news coverage seen almost daily by children on the television. • The imagination has a transfiguring effect and some hope can be presented even within the bleakest and most poignant of stories. • As artists, the clearest responsibility that they saw was to present a personal vision of the truth.

8. Conclusions of the Conference Participants • Particularly challenging is the task of representing current conflicts rather than past conflicts - even those of the more recent past (World War II) which, although vivid to most of the writers represented in these discussions, nevertheless remain distant to the present generation of children.

9. The Use of Trauma in YA Literature • In a recent essay, Kenneth Kidd asks, “How to explain this shift away from the idea that young readers should be protected from evil and toward the conviction that they should be exposed to it, perhaps even endangered by it? It's almost as if we now expect reading about trauma to be traumatic itself—as if we think children can't otherwise comprehend atrocity” (120).

10. The Use of Trauma in YA Literature • “Many people believe that the Holocaust fundamentally changed the way we think about memory and narrative, as well as about human nature. Presumably the exposure model became necessary because we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child's confrontation with evil” (120-121).

11. Contemporary YA Literature Focused on the Holocaust

12. The Use of Trauma in YA Literature • In Kidd’s view, “the wounded-but-resilient-child” enables adult authors (and readers) to feel less guilt regarding the sort of world that most children must navigate: a world in which children themselves have few rights, a situation only exacerbated during times of war.

13. The Use of Trauma in YA Literature • The idea that children can “bounce back” from trauma makes it easier to ignore the true costs of trauma – something that Meg Rosoff refuses to do in her novel. In fact, the concept of “how I live now” is meant to serve as an indictment of the easy way in which many authors end texts that involve trauma and war.

14. The Normative Center • The term “normative center” refers to the place in a text where ideal human interaction occurs. • In texts with a realist core, authors will often use a normative center alongside the depiction of violence and injustice. The reader is then invited to make a comparison between the two “locations.” • Given the manner in which concepts of “home” and “exile” are utilized in Rosoff’s novel, we will want to spend time thinking about whether and where normative centers might be located in the text.