Why the summer you were sixteen still feels bigger than the ones that came after

People ask me, nearly always a little sheepishly, why the books I write are set in the handful of years around sixteen and almost never later. Why not write the grown-ups, who after all have jobs and mortgages and far better reasons to cry. It is a fair question and I have a real answer, so here it is.

It is because sixteen is the last time most things happen to you for the first time, and the first time is louder than every time after it.

Think about it honestly. The first friendship that felt chosen rather than assigned by a seating plan. The first time a song seemed to have been written by someone who had read your diary. The first argument with a parent where you were, annoyingly, a bit right. The first person whose name did something to your stomach when a teacher read the register. None of these are bigger than the things that happen to a forty year old. They are just first, and the nervous system has not yet learned to turn the volume down.

That is the part people forget. By thirty you have a filing system. Heartbreak arrives and some back room of you says, ah, this again, I know roughly how long this lasts and which friends to call. At sixteen there is no filing system. The first heartbreak is not filed under heartbreak because the folder does not exist yet. It is filed under end of the world, because for all you know it is.

Adults sometimes read this as teenagers being dramatic. I think it is the opposite. Teenagers are being accurate about a thing they are feeling at full strength for the only time they will ever feel it that way. The drama is just honesty that has not yet been taught to apologise for itself.

The first heartbreak is not filed under heartbreak because the folder does not exist yet.

There is a reason the friends you make at that age sink the deepest hooks, and it is not that they were better people than the ones you meet at twenty-five. It is that you met them without armour. Nobody at sixteen is managing their personal brand. You find your people in the specific wreckage of not knowing who you are yet, and a bond formed in that particular weather does not quite come apart later, even when the people do.

So when a grown reader tells me, half apologising, that a book I wrote for fifteen year olds made them cry on a train, I do not think they have regressed. I think the book reached a part of them that is still exactly sixteen and always will be, sitting quietly under all the later years, remembering what it was like when everything was happening for the first time and nobody had told them yet that it would ever stop feeling that big.

It never entirely does. That is the secret the grown-ups are embarrassed to ask about. The summer you were sixteen is still in there. You just got better at not mentioning it.

Sixteen gets its full size in The Night Frequency, the story of Frankie Mercer, who cannot sleep and finds the only help in the basement, beside her father's ham radio.