NEW YORK - By the end of "The Notebook Girls," the story of four teens at an elite New York high school, the main characters have had the kinds of experiences that make parents cringe -- the loss of virginity, binge drinking, pot smoking. But Julia, Sophie, Courtney and Lindsey have also matured. They have mended fences with their parents and thought deeply about the world. They are on their way to college.

"Looking back on everything, I realized we all figured ourselves out in this mess," Courtney writes in a farewell note to her pals. "There's nothing we can't share."

The book is raw but also sentimental, the characters obsessed with making their way through high school's cruel pecking order. Parents are the objects of complaint, but they are on the periphery of the story. There's despair, and a happy ending.

It reads, in other words, like the typical "young adult," or YA, novel, found in the teen sections of bookstores and mostly written by adults.

But "The Notebook Girls," published this month by Warner Books with a first printing of 40,000, is not a novel. It's a real-life account written by four actual teenagers.

"We wanted to tell our story in our own words," said Julia Baskin, one of the authors. After all, she pointed out, "we lived through it."

Or, to put it more bluntly: Why let a bunch of middle-age people tell you what it's like to be an American teen?

That attitude is spreading as more teenage writers storm the barricades of publishing, starting with the YA category but by no means ending there. Indeed, some titles that previously would have been seen as young adult are now also being marketed to adult readers.

"Why should I have to wait years to get a book deal?" said Robyn Schneider, a Barnard College student from Irvine, Calif., who is the author of the novel "Better Than Yesterday," which is to be published by Delacorte in 2007 and is aimed at both audiences.

She describes the book, written when she was 18, as the tale of "four top students at an elite East Coast boarding school [who] run away to Manhattan, fall in love and learn to take the SATs a little bit less seriously."

While revenue in other sectors of the book industry remains flat, YA is booming. Sales for fiction alone have grown more than 23 percent in the past six years. Projections show continued growth, even if you subtract the "Harry Potter" books, according to Albert Greco, a Fordham University business professor who studies publishing trends.

Girls make the vast majority of these purchases, and publishers have focused most of their marketing strategies on them, through hugely popular paperback series such as "The Gossip Girls," "The Clique" and "Making Out."

A key reason for the success of YA books, which run the gamut from romances to mysteries, thrillers to self-help, religion to sports, is that there are far more teenagers than there were 15 years ago. They are part of the 12- to 21-year-old demographic that spends a staggering $170 billion annually on entertainment, including books.

Notwithstanding the case of J.T. Leroy, the adult who conned readers into thinking a cross-dressing teenage prostitute had written the well-received books "Sarah" and "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," publishers are increasingly willing to take teenagers seriously as the authors of adult titles.

This month, the adult division of Little Brown published "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," for which Harvard University sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan received a $500,000 advance as part of a two-book deal. She wrote the novel when she was 17.

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