Pretty Girl 13
What can you tell us about your new book Pretty Girl Thirteen?
There are secrets you can’t even tell yourself--the most terrible secrets, the ones your mind has to hide from to continue functioning. The human brain can cultivate a kind of protective madness in order to stay sane. Angie, a teenager with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) has to uncover the traumatic memories of her multiple personalities, who have lived out the worst events of her life to keep her safe. And even her secrets keep secrets from each other.
The book has been compared to The Lovely Bones and Room, so how does this make you feel?
I’ve read The Lovely Bones, but not Room. Strange to say, I anticipated the comparison based on my agent’s over-the-top reaction to the manuscript when I sent it to her. I believe my quote was, “Did I accidentally write the next Lovely Bones?” Room was released after I’d finished revisions, and I actually didn’t want to read it in case it jinxed my feelings about submitting another novel featuring captivity. As those books did extremely well, I’m both humbled and excited by the comparison.
How have you captured the voice of a young girl so effectively?
Thank you. When my mom was growing up, she felt that most adults were like a different species—unsympathetic and dismissive, as if they had never been children themselves, as if only adult feelings and reactions were legitimate. When I was little and asked why she was such a great mom, she shared the resolution she’d made as a child never to forget what it feels like, to honor every child’s internal life and emotional experience as totally real. That made a huge impression. I documented my childhood with journals and scrapbooks, and I memorialized the intense emotions, both good and bad. I can summon and release them like genies.
Why do you prefer to write for young adults?
I think there’s a hunger for books for teens offering either understanding (yeah, I remember, I get your issues) or escape (you can do magical, powerful things). I’ve written both kinds of stories--the kid trying to cope with his or her life or the ordinary kid doing something extraordinary for the world. As with many other kidlit authors. I started writing stories I thought my own three offspring would like to read. They’ve been honest critics and enthusiastic cheerleaders for me.
You write science fiction and fantasy short stories for anthologies and magazines, so what attracts you to this genre?
I’ve always been a science geek, and the future fills me with fascination. I wish I could walk on Mars. I wish I could fill myself with nanobots to make my body young again. I wish I could live a million years to see how it all turns out. The closest I can come is to read about it, dream about it, and write about it.
The story is unlike anything I have read before so where did the inspiration come from?
I like to say that it was the collision of a character, a question, and a title. Ever since finding out that someone of my acquaintance was a reintegrated multiple, I knew that one day I’d write a book about a protagonist with DID. As I was reading science magazines in the loo, I came across a new technique being developed to turn nerve cells on and off and I pondered whether memory could eventually be manipulated this way. And finally, in a shower moment, the title PG-13 popped into my head and unspooled into the premise for the story.
You have a wide variety of interests other than writing, such as sewing, baking, shooting photos and tennis, so how do you fit these around your writing schedule?
Schedule? Ha! I’m one of those undisciplined pantsers who procrastinates, doesn’t outline, and prefers to write under the heat of inspiration. I also do the bulk of my drafting each year in November during National Novel Writing Month and use the rest of the calendar to finish, edit, and polish, which doesn’t take nearly as many hours as you might think.
What was your favourite novel when you were a young girl?
My first favourite novel was The Secret Garden, read to me by my British mom (known at the time as Mummy) with all the broad Yorkshire accents. I am still in love with gardens, old brick walls, and roses. And Dickon. I was captivated by the notion of secret places for children to discover.
What is next for you?
I’ve got another dark psychological novel I’ll be trying to sell, about truth and lies, dreams and reality, guilt and forgiveness, fear and love.
When did you first begin to enjoy writing?
That is an excellent question. While I liked writing bad poetry as a maudlin teenager, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer until quite a bit later. Immediately after college, my best friend was working in publishing, and she got me started with a few co-authored short children’s stories and a romance novel, which never saw the light of day. In spite of repeated rejection, something sparked inside me; I loved the escape into my own imagination that writing offered. Writing was as immersive as reading. As time went on, I made a deliberate decision to persist, and signed up for a correspondence course (1994), started attending writing workshops at sci-fi conferences (1998), joined the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (2005), and began finishing and submitting my work with a sense of purpose.