“I'm Going to Be Straight, Just Like How My Father Would've Wanted”
Adolescent Male Sexuality, Shame, and Symptoms of Mental Illness in Adam Silvera's More Happy Than Not and John Corey Whaley's Highly Illogical Behaviour
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Abstract
While the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ identities in recent young adult fiction has received much critical attention, such novels that contain the added complex distinction of adolescent male mental illness and recovery represent an underexamined area. This article produces readings of two recent young adult texts that feature gay male protagonists who experience mental illness: Adam Silvera's More Happy Than Not (2015) and John Corey Whaley's Highly Illogical Behaviour (2016). It investigates how the texts’ embedded heteronormative scripts, relationships between the symptoms and the self, and frameworks of health-related shame are fraught with anxieties, producing a complex double movement that simultaneously establishes and undermines gay males’ control over their mental illnesses and recovery trajectories to move the characters between spaces of empowerment and marginalization.
Contributor Notes
Emma Salt-Raper began her PhD in English literature at the University of Leeds in 2019. Her research involves representations of mental illness and trajectories of recovery within twenty-first-century young adult novels. Emma has written for The Polyphony and the Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities and has given conference papers at the Food and/in Children's Culture Conference, the Fourth Annual Congress of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research, and Alternate, Virtual, and Augmented Realities: A Postgraduate and Early-Career Medical Humanities Conference. She has also been on the editorial team for the Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities. Email: enesa@leeds.ac.uk ORCID: