The books you read at fifteen are reading you back

People are embarrassed about the books they loved at fifteen, and I think the embarrassment is the most interesting thing about them. You can watch a grown adult, a serious person with a mortgage, go slightly pink describing the series they stayed up all night with at that age, as if confessing to something, and then, almost always, they keep talking, because the truth is they remember those books in a way they do not remember anything they have read since. That is not because the books were better. Some of them were not very good at all. It is because fifteen is the age at which reading stops being something you are made to do and becomes something you do to work out who you are going to be, and a book that arrives at that moment does not merely get read, it gets absorbed, it becomes part of the equipment you carry into the rest of your life, and you do not get that intensity back, not at twenty five, not at fifty, however much better your taste becomes in the meantime. The scorn we pour on teenage reading, the eye roll at the love triangle and the chosen one and the summer that changed everything, is really scorn poured backwards onto our own younger selves for having felt things without irony, for having underlined a sentence and meant it, for having believed that a story could teach us to be braver than we were. I write for people who are standing in that exact moment now, and the thing I try never to forget is that they are not a smaller, sillier version of adult readers waiting to grow up into real literature. They are reading at the one point in a life when a book can still change its direction, and they know it, which is why they read so hard, and argue so fiercely about people who do not exist, and defend a story as though it were a friend, because at fifteen it very nearly is one. The adults who look down on all of this have simply forgotten that they were built, in part, out of precisely this: a few paperbacks with cracked spines, read too fast, loved too much, and never quite put down. So no, I will not write those readers something safely minor. They deserve the full thing, the fear and the first love and the floor going out from under them, because whatever I put in front of them now is not only being read, it is being kept. The books you loved at fifteen go on reading you back for the rest of your life, and if you are lucky, and if someone wrote them honestly, you never entirely stop hearing them.

If you still keep a book from fifteen close, The Unpoured is my love letter to that age: a city where promises are poured into glass, and a girl the glass will not hold.