In 'Old Enough' the Painful Realities of Girlhood Are on Display

“But we wanted to be ruined; all teenage girls do,” author Haley Jakobson writes in her debut novel “Old Enough.” The line sticks in my throat because it is such an apt distillation of girlhood and youth, and how the line between desire and ruin is often blurred. The book as a whole is threaded throughout with moments like this which perfectly show both the clarity and confusion of growing up. Jakobson’s book is part coming-of-age story, part self-proclaimed “big bisexual novel”, part treatise on the ways friendship and girlhood and brushes at love – or something like it – leaves us bruised.

“Old Enough” follows Sav Henry, a bisexual college student, as she balances the new world she’s trying to find her place in and the past that won’t quite let her out of its grip. When Sav’s childhood best friend, Izzie, gets engaged, Sav navigates the festivities of the upcoming wedding while being faced with traumatic past memories she hasn’t yet recovered from, or even truly faced.

Teen Vogue sat down with Jakobson to talk about the writing process, queer representation, and what her hopes are as “Old Enough” reaches readers.

Teen Vogue: Part of your celebration of this book has been that it’s a “big bisexual novel”. Did you set out to make representation a part of your work or did that just happen?

Haley Jakobson: When it was time to put the whole book together, I knew that I wanted to write a really gay book and I wanted to have a bisexual main character. I really can't imagine writing a protagonist who wasn't queer or bisexual, like, ever. I don't think I have the capacity to write a straight character or would enjoy living in the head of a straight character for 300 pages.

TV: You wrote about friendship breakups, sexual assault, queerness, and trying to find your friends in college. This felt very much like a book for young people. Did you know you wanted to touch on these themes?

HJ: I think I knew the themes of Old Enough before I knew anything else. I knew that I wanted to write a book for survivors specifically in a post #MeToo world. I knew that I wanted to excavate girlhood and the nostalgia and pain of it. I knew that I wanted to write about friendship breakups because we just don't talk about them enough at all. And they're so pervasive. And they're just ripe with the most intense grief, this ambiguous grief that we often don't know how to name. So I, as a writer, will often write down all the themes that I want to explore before I even go into the story. And then I remember as I was writing Old Enough, perhaps halfway through, I went back to my themes list and I was like, Have I touched on all the themes that I want to touch on? Have I done them service?

TV: What’s your writing process like?

HJ: Mostly my days looked like doing what I could to center myself in my body earlier in the day. Do all the self nurturing that you can before sitting yourself down to get your work done. And then I would just sit and write for an hour, two hours at a time. I'm definitely a word count girlie, so I just pick how many words I got to write and I get them done. But I definitely am not a linear writer, so I very often let myself jump forwards in time or went back and wrote something that I hadn't filled in yet. I did outline the second half of my novel, but not the first. That part of my writing process did shift towards the end, which was interesting. But I think with your first novel, you're just throwing just shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.It's just this ambiguous nebulous thing until it's not. And so all I really asked of myself was to sit down every day and write. And that's how I got it done. It's a blur when I look back now.

TV: What are your hopes for the book?

HJ: I really wrote this book for survivors. I wrote this book for many people, but I think perhaps if we're talking about the parts of myself that I really wanted to write for, it was for survivors, and I am a survivor. And so I'm hopeful to have conversations in which I find out that people do feel really seen by this book and feel like there's a map to healing in some way, or that reading it in itself is healing.

"Old Enough" will be available on June 20. 

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