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"  For me, writing a book is like a very long version of that childhood game Marco Polo. I sit alone in my basement for a few years saying, &amp;quot;Marco, Marco, Marco, Marco,&amp;quot; and then finally the book comes out. And if I&amp;#039;m lucky, people start saying, &amp;quot;Polo!&amp;quot; When writing my novel The Fault in Our Stars, I always imagined those people would be teenagers. My books are for young adults, after all. But in the weeks after The Fault in Our Stars was published in 2012, I heard from more and more proper adults. They told me their kids had given them the book or they&amp;#039;d read it in book club or their friends had recommended it. Suddenly, the vast majority of my readers were grown-ups. Ever since, I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about why stories about teenagers resonate so much with us as adults. I&amp;#039;ve been a passionate adult reader of YA fiction for a decade, and what I find so compelling about the best YA fiction is its unironic emotional honesty. When you&amp;#039;re a teenager, you&amp;#039;re often doing so many important things for the first time &amp;amp;#151; everything from falling in love to grappling with heartache and loss. You also begin to ask the big questions of humanness: What, if anything, is the meaning to all this? What are my responsibilities to myself and to others? My favorite YA stories approach these questions directly and enthusiastically. Author Sarah Dessen writes wonderful love stories, but they also confront issues of abuse and divorce head-on. Laurie Halse Anderson&amp;#039;s novels deal compellingly with eating disorders and sexual assault. Series like Veronica Roth&amp;#039;s Divergent and Marie Lu&amp;#039;s Prodigy may be set in dystopic futures, but they&amp;#039;re honest and straightforward in their social analysis. They&amp;#039;re not just beautiful stories, they&amp;#039;re also useful ones. It&amp;#039;s not like we stop needing the comfort and help that a good story can bring when we graduate from high school. I am still looking for answers to questions about the meaning of life. I am still trying to fathom the wondrous strangeness of love. I am still trying to make my way through life despite heartache and loss. So yes, when I set out to write a novel about two young people living with cancer who fall in love with a book and then with each other, I was writing it for teenagers. But I was also writing it for my adult self &amp;amp;#151; the one who wanted to know whether love really is stronger than death and who wanted to find hope and joy and humor amid hard times. Those desires know no age. Reader or writer, we love stories about teenagers, because although they can be cynical about many things, they aren&amp;#039;t cynical about love, hope, and the stuff that really matters, like the future. While I am profoundly glad I will never be a teen again, I am thrilled to read (and write) about them because, deep down, it&amp;#039;s their enthusiasm and curiosity that we can all admire and wish to emulate long after we&amp;#039;ve reached proper adult status. Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley star in The Fault in Our Stars in theaters June 6. This article was originally published as &amp;quot;#RealTalk: There&amp;#039;s No Age Limit to Loving Teen Drama&amp;quot; in the June 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to get the issue in the iTunes store! RELATED: The New &amp;#039;The Fault in Our Stars&amp;#039; Trailer Will Make You Feel Things 12 Best Love Quotes of All Time Why You Love Heroes Who Have Issues Photo credit: Twentieth Century Fox "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a6686/too-old-for-young-adult-fiction/>