Urban Fiction for Teen Girls: An Author’s View

Author Rachel Skerritt has published three novels and is working on a fourth. She is also principal of a Boston area high school. We spoke to her about urban fiction and her own writing experiences.

TV: As a teenage girl, what genre of books caught your eye? Why?

Rachel: I liked books about girls my age having adventures that I wasn’t really having. I was a bookworm, so I liked reading about other people doing exciting things. I like things that reflect me and people who I know.

TV: How did you get your start as an author?

Rachel: I had a big crush on this guy in college who was writing a book, and he asked me to help him with it, because I was an English major and I was good with grammar. So I spent a couple of years helping him with his book. Once it was finished and he got a book deal, I thought, “Why did I spend all this time helping someone else when I could’ve been writing my own book and getting my own book deal and my own money and my own readers?” So I wrote my own version of a college coming-of-age novel. I started it my senior year of college and finished it my first year out of college. I self-published it. Once I realized that it was possible to write something that long, I wanted to keep writing more.

TV: What kind of books are you seeing teens read? What do you think about this?

Rachel: I see teenagers reading some crazy stuff. I always find these discarded books in lockers at the end of the year. They were so scandalous they were making all the teachers blush. One was called Thong on Fire; others were Thug Matrimony and A Hustler’s Wife. They’re a little scary. People are reading Zane a lot, and she frightens me a little bit. If her books were movies, I wouldn’t let anyone I know watch them. I’m really happy that teenagers are reading, but I wish that there were more positive role models in the stories. A lot of the girls are compromising themselves; they’re not the strongest of characters, and they’re not making the best decisions. I worry about that being the only type of character that we’re seeing with this street lit. I also think that the books come out so quickly that they’re not well edited. I see a lot of typos and poor wording. I wish there was a higher quality of writing in urban fiction.

TV: How do you portray women in your novels, both overall and in terms of sex and relationships?

Rachel: I’m very conscious of this because I’ve been so bothered seeing what teenagers are reading and what’s on TV, so I try to create images that contrast those. My female characters are extremely ambitious, they’re outspoken, they have problems in relationships because they can have trouble opening up or being vulnerable to people. A lot of times the characters in my books have to strike that balance between respecting themselves and being independent and also letting someone else love them.

TV: Why do you think teens are interested in urban fiction?

Rachel: Honestly, if I were a teenager I would probably be reading it too. I didn’t have it when I was a teenager; there really weren’t that many books about young people of color. There are a lot of things in the books that young people can relate to, especially since they’re set in cities and most of the readers are urban teens. I also think that their lives are pretty dramatic and scandalous, so in terms of an escape, in reading something that’s different from your life, it can be exciting. I also think that there is this attraction to the bad boy image and this idea that the bad boy always has this soft spot for the right girl.

TV: How do you feel about how teen girls are portrayed in urban fiction?

Rachel: I don’t see many books about young women who have very clear academic or professional ambitions or are working toward those ambitions. I see [female characters] who place a high priority on money, and who will do a lot of things to get money – and those things don’t include bettering themselves through education or a job. I also notice that when female characters have to choose between men, they tend to go for the one who is more dangerous and mysterious, and is often not available to them emotionally. I also worry about the relationships that women have with each other in these books. One thing that’s important to me in my novels is that women have a strong circle of friends, and I’ve consciously not written books where friends are betraying each other for men. That’s something that happens a lot in high school, where girls turn on each other in petty situations. I wish there were “girl cohesiveness” in these books, because the idea that friendships can be that fickle or that fragile concerns me.

TV: How do you think urban fiction affects teen girls?

Rachel: It creates a very narrow image of what a teen girl has to look like, act like, or do in order to be popular, successful, and desirable. When you think about who the protagonists are in a lot of these stories, they’re either the prettiest girl on the block or the hardest girl on the block. It seems like you have to pick one of those if you want to be successful socially, and I don’t think that’s true. But from a positive perspective, people are reading, and it makes it very realistic for you to imagine putting pen to paper and creating your own masterpieces.