Juno Dawson is a YA novelist and author of the memoir The Gender Games. Her latest YA novel is Clean.From Dawson's Q&A with Michael Hogan for the Guardian:
Drugs, sex and swearing feature highly in Clean, so what makes it a young adult novel?--Marshal Zeringue
The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them. I don’t think people will have a problem with how I’ve handled addiction. What might cause a fuss is [protagonist] Lexi’s positive attitude to sex. She clearly enjoys it. We never teach girls that sex should be enjoyable for them. That’s one thing porn absolutely doesn’t do. Pornography is not sex education.
Lexi’s heroin use is vividly portrayed. Do you have first-hand experience?
No. I was the most well-behaved adolescent, then went straight from university into being a primary schoolteacher. That’s not a job you could do half-cut. By the time I moved to Brighton a few years ago, I felt I’d missed my window to misbehave. So I....[read on]