“I’m obsessed with why people are so scared about sex,” Non Pratt muses. She has never been one to pull punches. Her acclaimed debut novel, Trouble follows Hannah, a 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant. Although recent statistics show teenage pregnancy rates in the UK falling closer into line with the rest of Europe, it’s a topic that still interests Pratt for what it reveals about our attitudes to teenagers and sex.
Pratt found the idea for Trouble while listening to the radio, she explains. “Somebody was getting really angry about teenagers being pregnant, but they were talking about pregnant teenagers as if there was a type of person who got pregnant. I got really angry – there is not one type of person who gets pregnant,” she says. “I got angry enough that I wanted to write something where Hannah looks like the type of person who gets pregnant, but when you look closer you see that she’s a human being. There’s no such thing as types, she’s not of the demographic you might expect.”
Ever since she was 14, the age she started writing, Pratt has been “obsessed” with society’s attitudes to teenagers and sex, and “how we treat teenagers who are both sexually confident or sexually curious”. While today’s culture is hyper-sexualised, Pratt believes that young people are still encouraged to be frightened of sex. “We still talk about it as though sex is this terrible, terrifying thing, when actually it’s the one thing that you want your teenagers, as adults, to grow into adults to enjoy,” she says. “All of the other things that people worry about like drugs, alcohol, violence – those things can kill you. You don’t want people to grow up and be good at taking drugs. But you actually do want someone to grow up and be good at having sex, because it’s an important and healthy part of living.”
Along with alcohol and swearing, her novels portray sex candidly, honestly. The opening lines of Trouble, for example, are: “I had sex with Fletch again last night. It was all right, better than last time anyway […] We didn’t cuddle afterwards – that’s not really how it is with us.”
Is the brutal honesty in her fiction intended as educational, trying to make up for an absence of open discussion in schools? Pratt believes the efficacy of courses such as the UK’s PSHE can be “so hit and miss – there are some schools who are good at opening up a discussion, and there are others who just pretend that it isn’t happening. I just don’t think that it should be a lottery.” What could be done to improve it? “You should be talking about consent, and you should be talking about sexuality all the time; the ridiculous assumption that everybody’s heterosexual is a dangerous and unhelpful precedent. We should be dismantling that through schools.”
Friendship rather than sexuality, however, is the strongest dynamic across all of Pratt’s novels. Her latest, Unboxed, concerns a group of friends who reunite to open a time capsule created before one of them died. Remix features two best friends who attend a music festival after messy breakups, and at the core of Trouble is an intriguing friendship between Hannah and a boy named Aaron, who pretends to be the father of her baby while she hides the true father’s identity.
“I think friendship is an underrated theme in children’s literature, and in adult literature too,” Pratt muses. “When I go on school visits, I ask who has had a romantic relationship and perhaps a smattering of hands will go up. Then I ask who’s had a friendship, and every hand goes up! A friendship is one of the most important relationships you can have, and the only time I’ve ever been truly heartbroken is when I stopped being friends with someone. It was the worst feeling, it took me much longer to recover from than any breakup. I want to write about this in books and I want to explore that bond that you develop between people and how elastic, or brittle it is.” And she’s going to; her fourth novel, Truth or Dare – due out in 2017 – follows two friends who begin performing dares for money. Prepare for more harsh truths.
