Laura Nowlin’s Books for Teens

Laura Nowlin is a writer from St Louis whose two-book series “If Only” is mega popular among the teenage #BookTok crowd. The books read easily and invest teenage experience with such importance and coolness that it’s understandable why kids love them.

The world Nowlin creates in the series is worth talking about because it presents some things as normal that I didn’t necessarily expect. Here are some of them:

Fathers

The world of “Is Only” is a world of single mothers. Dads are either dead or evil. This is an upper-middle-class environment of people with trust funds and trips to Europe, so the absence of fathers in the literary universe does not correspond to the reality of the social class that’s depicted and will read the books. The single mothers of the books are portrayed as amazing but it’s unclear how such wonderful women are so incapable of keeping a man around.

Politics

The books insist that all good people are left-wing because being on the Left is the same as being kind. There’s no framework for kindness and abnegation, and these qualities are tinged as political because of that lack.

Abortion

Abortion is a possibility that lies outside of moral concerns but the books veritably glorify teenage pregnancy. The second book in the series, in particular, lays it on so thick one immediately wants to go back in time and get pregnant as a teenager. Again, these books won’t be read by any teens who are likely to get pregnant before the age of 28. Those girls who are don’t read. So it’s interesting that there’s such a detailed foray into the pleasures of teenage single motherhood where babies are raised by all-female communities of manless women.

Sex

The series’ understanding of love is what I found to be the most bizarre. It posits that you can deeply, genuinely and seriously love several people at the same time and have sex with all of them. There are gradations in these “loves”, with some being more important than others but all these liaisons come under the label of love. Adult romance is a lot more monogamous, and one struggles to imagine a situation where adult female readers would find it satisfactory for a romantic idol character to inform his beloved that she’s one of a small harem but he prefers her a tad more.

Pills

The books are heavily into the medicalization of normal life. They posit that depression is something that just happens to people randomly and it’s normal to become a life-long pill-taker at a very young age. The novels also normalize heavy alcohol intake by very young children. It gets quite tiresome to read page after page about how everybody got extremely drunk.

In short, the world described in the novels is one where women should be happy to be chosen as one of the seraglio of mini-loves by a romantic idol and then prepare themselves for lonesome child-raring and pill-popping in the company of other discarded, pill-popping women. Of course, money and magically materializing “careers” will appear out of nowhere to reward you but you’ll still pill up and booze up to bear such a life.