I've watched a few episodes of The Hills. A friend of a friend is a writer on the show (or a story designer or whatever you call someone who writes for a program that is technically unscripted). It's a terrible show, of course. But there's nothing inherently wrong with terrible shows. I watch lots of them.

I do think The Hills is a little more evil than most terrible TV shows, because it glorifies the kind of anti-intellectualism and self-involvement that lately seem to define Americans to the world. The Hills plays to young people's darkest fears, but worse than that it plays to their darkest hopes--that strangers, and millions of them, will like them and want to be them, that their lives will be played out on a bigger stage than most lives, and that somehow being watched will fill the hole inside them. (I wrote a novel about this one time a few years ago.)

Some people like to say that creative work has no responsibility except to entertain its audience. But that's not true, and I think we all know it. We say such things so we can sleep at night, because it's unbearable to acknowledge that we are exploiting young people so that we might have more money (or, worse, more fame).

(I am by no means immune to this, or even a lesser offender: Many times in my life I've made decisions where I prioritized not my readers, as I should have, but myself or my family. There are all kinds of justifications for this behavior, but they all fall a little flat.)

So here's my question: What does giving Lauren Conrad a 3-book deal to write young adult novels accomplish?

On the downside:

1. It is ery bad for YA literature. It makes people take YA books less seriously, which will hurt sales among the readers we most need to grow. And it further propagates the insidious lie that YA books, particularly of the 'chick lit' variety, can be written by anyone.

2. LC's book deal is probably slightly bad for the world, in the way that it further contributes to the idea that celebrity is in and of itself desirable because it gives you easy access to anything you want.

3. These books will take up space on the shelf that could be occupied by books that could sell well for a much longer period of time--the kind of books that hang around because they are well-written and carefully crafted by people who care more about the experience of writing a book than the money it pays. (And I don't just mean 'literary fiction.')

On the upside:

1. I'm sure some kids will read it and it will be the first book they ever finished and blah blah blah. I've never bought this line of argument, and neither would Aristotle, because it is exceptionally poorly reasoned. (I mean, if you'd published a different book, a better book, how do you know IT wouldn't have been the first book that kid ever finished?) Also, as I've said before, I think once you are reasonably literate, there is basically nothing gained from reading a bad book that cannot be gained from watching a bad TV show.

2. Somebody at HarperCollins presumably thinks they are going to make some money. I doubt they actually WILL make money--celebrity books usually don't--but they think they will. They think they can take the sloppy seconds of celebrity and offer empty and condescending wish-fulfillment to vulnerable kids who desperately want their voices to be heard in the way that LC's is. There's nothing wrong with them for wanting to be heard--all of us, from Holden Caulfield to Jane Eyre to teen-me to teen-you. There's nothing wrong with that desire at all. But there's something wrong with exploiting it.

Maybe they'll make money off it. After all, you can exploit all of the teenagers some of the time. But in the long run, they won't make money, and they'll undercut the entire publishing business, because you can't exploit all (or even most) of the teenagers all (or even most) of the time.