Harvard’s poetry professor Stephen Burt, in the New Yorker, made these observations: “Between the depictions of teen-age yearning (erotic and otherwise) and the practical lessons about sex, it’s a novel that many teens really ought to read, though it could not be promoted as Y.A. Adam is about a teen boy’s search for identity amid a sea of options. But what, I would often think, staring at Adam Rapp in the writers’ room, was Adam’s role?” Would he go to dyke bars, too? The amusing idea eventually morphed into the novel. Here’s Schrag: “The older lesbians knew about long-term relationships, parenting and career woes. At HBO, her co-workers were five older lesbians and the straight-guy Adam Rapp.
Adam is her first novel, and, once you know Schrag’s background, the story acts as a cumulative lift from her childhood, LGBT culture and her work as L Word’s youngest lesbian writer who cruised dyke clubs to report back on twentysomethings. She went on to study English at Columbia University and also wrote for TV’s How to Make It in America and The L Word. Her own teen turbulence is chronicled in four graphic memoirs, the first of which was published when she was in high school. It’s a comic conceit, given that Schrag’s goal is to make readers laugh. When he meets Gillian, a lesbian, and falls in love, he games the system: Passing as a trans guy might work in his favor. Casey is entrenched in a wild lesbian subculture, and Adam finds himself on the fringe of that.
The vibe around him – gay marriage demonstrations and the rise of transgender rights – challenges the kid’s sense of identity. In the summer of 2006, Adam Freeman, the teen protagonist of Ariel Schrag’s novel Adam, goes to Brooklyn to stay with his post-grad sister Casey.
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