Jason Reynolds on writing for Black youth and the inspiration for his new novel
‘The assumption is that boys don't have interior lives,’ the author tells Q's Tom Power
Jason Reynolds's new novel, Twenty-Four Seconds From Now…., captures the inner world and emotions of Neon, a young Black man, as he experiences the anticipation, vulnerability and excitement of having sex for the first time.
"I'm writing all the books I wish I had," Reynolds tells Q's Tom Power in a new interview. "My whole career is just me sort of thinking back about all the ways that I was and all the things that I could have used and could have helped me to feel a little less alone or a little less strange," he says.
Through Neon's narration and inner thoughts, Reynolds wants to challenge the image of "the kid in school who's hyper advanced and walks around like he knows everything and has done everything by the time he's 16 years old." It's his protagonist's sheltered experience, argues Reynolds, that is more common than what we're made to believe. "Neon is the average boy, but media would have you believe that Neon is the anomaly."
Why young men don't read romance
Earlier in his career, Reynolds toured juvenile detention centres. In one of them, a librarian asked him to guess which book genre was checked out the most. While he anticipated something "gritty, … something about the realities and the harshness that they have," it turned out to be romance novels. Reynolds recalls the librarian explaining to him that the kids are "vicariously living their lives through the authors' words, because they're incarcerated at the time they would be having their firsts."
"It made me sad," he adds, "but it didn't make me nearly as sad as when I left there and I thought about how those same young men could never feel the freedom or the safety or the confidence, for that matter, to pick up a romance novel when they were free."
Few stories approach this experience from the point-of-view of a young man. "The assumption is that boys don't have interior lives. There's something to be said about the fact that boys are expected to be feral animals and walking phalluses. There's something to be said about the fact that we get taught how to put on condoms, we get taught consent, and then the conversation ends. But there's no conversation around sexual health in [relation] to ourselves, let alone in relationship to our partners," says Reynolds.
These expectations take on a bigger dimension when it comes to young Black men. "When it comes to our sexual prowess, there's an assumption — one that is rooted in some strange projection of confidence and assertiveness, let alone the physical stereotypes that we all live with by the time we're 12 — that's pushed upon us that … there's so much power in our sexuality, all of which is just, you know, historically stereotypical and harmful to us."
By engaging with young people on equal footing, Reynolds reaches and resonates with millions of young readers. "From my experiences and from my travels, young people are begging and dying for us to treat them like people first without strapping the age to them, because they feel like you're infantilizing them even when you're not trying to."
Reynolds is one of the winners of the 2024 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, also known as the "genius grant." His new novel, Twenty Four Seconds From Now…., is available now.
The full interview with Jason Reynolds is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Jason Reynolds produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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