Autoboyography

Autoboyography by Christina Lauren is a standalone YA Romance published in 2017 — a coming-of-age love story set against the quietly stifling backdrop of Provo, Utah. Tanner Scott is counting down his final semester of high school, coasting on the comfortable knowledge that college and freedom are just months away. He's bisexual, he's been quietly back in the closet since his family relocated from California three years ago, and he has absolutely no intention of complicating things. Then his best friend Autumn dares him to enrol in the school's elite Seminar class, where a handful of honour-roll students attempt to write an entire novel in four months. Tanner accepts, mostly to prove the point that it's a terrible idea.

He notices Sebastian Brother in approximately one second. A published author at nineteen, a deeply faithful member of the LDS Church, and the class's teaching assistant, Sebastian is the kind of person Tanner shouldn't want — and can't stop thinking about. What begins as admiration curdles quickly into something far more complicated, as the two grow closer through shared drafts and late conversations, and the boundaries between mentorship and connection begin to blur. The Forbidden Romance at the novel's heart isn't simply about two people wanting different things; it's about what happens when one person's sense of self is bound up entirely in a community that has no place for who he truly is.

Christina Lauren handle the Faith vs Truth tension with genuine care. The Mormon community of Provo is never reduced to a single note — members are shown as generous, principled, and warm, even as the institutional expectations placed on Sebastian become a source of real Emotional Trauma. Tanner's own Exploration of Identity and Belonging runs in parallel: a half-Jewish, bisexual outsider who has learned to shrink himself for the sake of a quiet life, now forced to reckon with what it costs him. The Diverse Representation feels integral rather than incidental, and the Slow-burn Romance is shaped as much by what the characters won't say as by what they do.

The writing — characteristically sharp for Christina Lauren, with the Witty Banter & Sharp Dialogue that has become their hallmark — keeps even the heaviest moments from collapsing under their own weight. Tanner's narrative voice is self-aware and frequently funny, which makes the moments of genuine Emotional Vulnerability land harder. The novel-within-a-novel structure, in which Tanner writes his own story as his Seminar project, adds a quietly clever layer: the book you're reading and the book he's writing are, in a sense, the same book.

For readers who want Coming of Age fiction that takes both romance and religion seriously — without flattening either into caricature — Autoboyography is exactly that. It was a Goodreads Choice Nominee for Best Young Adult Fiction 2017, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and an ALA Rainbow List Finalist, with hundreds of thousands of reader ratings attesting to its lasting resonance.