Love & Passion Quote by Paula Danziger

A children’s novelist admitting she hasn’t “gone there” sexually isn’t coyness so much as a line in the sand: a reminder that what we ask kid-lit to contain is never just an artistic choice, it’s a cultural negotiation. Paula Danziger’s first clause reads like craft talk - my characters haven’t had sex yet - but the rhythm quickly turns into a moral weather report. “Yet” implies inevitability, the sense that adolescence is approaching like a plot point. Then she swerves: she doesn’t want to “deal with what’s happening in Oregon - the school shootings.” That dash is doing heavy lifting, yanking the conversation from coming-of-age intimacy to public catastrophe.

The subtext is less prudish than exhausted. Danziger is naming a hierarchy of taboos that American culture keeps in a strange order: sex is “controversial” in youth fiction, while violence has become a grim, recurring headline kids are expected to metabolize. By pairing these topics, she exposes the contradiction without preaching. Her reluctance isn’t denial of reality; it’s an author’s refusal to turn trauma into content on demand, especially when the events are fresh enough to still be actively harming real communities.

Context matters: Danziger wrote in an era when YA was expanding but still policed by gatekeepers - parents, schools, libraries - who often treated sexual frankness as scandal while tolerating depictions of threat. Her comment reads like a quiet protest against that imbalance, and a defense of imaginative space: stories can help kids grow up, but they shouldn’t be drafted as first responders to America’s failures.