I’ve been following and enjoying Mike Winerip’s pieces in the New Jersey section of the NY Times for the last year or so. A few weeks ago he wrote about girls and designer goods and their ‘product placement’ in young adult novels. This is currently a hot topic in publishing circles and certainly a hot topic for me and not just as a writer. When my daughter hit 16 and we sent her on a teen tour (full disclosure: I went on the original Musiker Teen Tours with Judy and Mike Musiker. The reunions were in the basement of their house) she discovered that not everyone in the world was okay with Levi's and the occasional Nordstrom's upgrade. We got a frantic, whispered, call from Montana one night ('Mom, thank God you sent me with a pair of Sevens and by the way, what's a trundle bed and do I have one???')

The high school in our town is regional and the 4 towns that use it are quite a socioeconomic mix, often difficult to navigate. While I know in the long run my children, these mini-diplomats, will gain immeasurable gifts from the experience, now that both kids have been exposed to camp in New England, trips across country and to Europe and summer sessions at A List universities, there is an ongoing mantra in our household. They often ask, "We don't understand, you grew up in Great Neck, so if you wanted to move, couldn't you have just gone to Roslyn?"

I suppose by moving to our more rural corner of the North Jersey suburbs it was my attempt to shield them from all of the nonsense and hype, the mandatory material rights of passage (for me it was that first opal ring and leather jacket and Pontiac Firebird-we're talking late 70's and it was mild in comparison but didn't feel that way to my parents at the time) and insure a more 'wholesome' childhood. Yeah, right. Can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to inject your values like you would a daily dose of insulin. And while I do agree that we are a society of runaway and ridiculous consumers, when it comes to teenage novels, I believe that, like all art, they reflect and don’t promote, what’s happening in society, just as edgy books like Goodbye Columbus or Portnoy or Valley of The Dolls reflected the era of sex and drugs years ago.

I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing but I do know you can't shut it down. And, as an LCSW and former school social worker I can tell you that girls that read (anything!) are likely to fair well later on. Instead of taking books off shelves as some propose, I say we lobby Fendi and Marc Jacobs to make inner slots for BOOKS just as they do for IPods and phones. That's what I call 'joining them'. P.S. I confess to a secret stash of Harold Robbins novels even as I transitioned from Long Island to Ann Arbor and loftier material.

As for my daughter of the 'teen tour travails', she did sell Cutco knives the summer she turned 18 and earned several thousand dollars and blew most of it that fall on Kate Spade bags. My husband and I were devastated but the lesson she learned now that she has graduated college and is working and (semi) supporting herself is that it was a huge waste of money and she'd love to have those dollars back. She thinks long and hard these days about where her money goes and more importantly, where she gets her self worth. So it took a few years. But, as those of us with older children say, '25 is the new 18'. And, under the heading of ‘be careful what you ask for’, the son who wanted to live in Roslyn actually attends Hofstra Law, which is just an exit or two down the highway, and counts the months until he can get off Long Island! Okay, so I’m smiling just a bit.

Although my next book marries memoir/cooking/self help (and world peace while I'm at it?) I've also begun to outline a YA (which is why I focused on this article) and when I mentioned to my agent that I was going to begin to explore what's out there, she said NO, Please don't! I'm not sure if she speaks for the entire publishing world but my sense is that there are a lot of parents of middle and high school kids at the editorial level who would like a little less Malandrino and lot more Mockingbird. This doesn't bode well for my main character, who finds meaning in a lip gloss...but I'll let you know.

For now, here's my product placement: It’s very early in the morning and while I'd love to tell you that I'm sitting here writing in Prada P.J.'s and Jimmy Choos, the only brand names I'm really accessing are 'Gevalia' and 'Advil'.