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Thursday, July 19, 2007

Author Interview: Sara Zarr
Current mood: awake


Sara Zarr Interview

Sara congratulations on writing one of the best teen dramas I've read in a long time. It really stuck with me, and forced me to revisit some of the brutalities of high-school politics. Ideally, what would you like your teen readers to take away from Deanna's story?

Thanks so much---I'm glad you enjoyed it. As far as the takeaway for readers, I don't know if there's any one thing. I just wanted to tell a good story, to write the kind of story I'd like to read. I can tell you some of the things that interested me while I wrote it, things that matter to me that I wanted to explore: how you can find family or community outside of your biological ties, the ways meaningful friendships are can be complicated but nearly always worth the work, and how sometimes the tiniest one or two degree turn towards hope can make all the difference.

During thirteen year-old Deanna's premature sexual encounters with her brother's seventeen year-old friend, she dreams up a story about a girl in the ocean. What was the purpose of this side story? Was Deanna just trying to remove herself from the situation, or was she a writer in the making?

I think she just didn't have anyone to talk to about it, or about any of the feelings and circumstances that led to that situation. She's isolated because her family isn't paying attention and she knows something's wrong with the "relationship" and therefore isn't telling her friends about it. Creating stories and fantasies about our lives---the way they are, or the ways we hope they can or will be---is one way we start to find solutions. From a writing standpoint, it was a way to bring in a different dimension of Deanna, the feelings under the feelings that are harder to articulate in the usual ways.

I talk to a lot of people who are very drawn to the cover of your book. I was. I've also been known to pick up books because the cover intrigues me. What do you think about the cover?

I love it. It wasn't at all what I expected, and when I first saw the concept I wasn't too sure. But when I saw the final result, I was blown away. The model, Lindsay, did an amazing job. The expression on her face is pure perfection for the story. I don't know how she did it. I still wonder if she's ever read the book and what she thinks. (I just saw the cover concept for my second book, and I have to say that the design department at Little, Brown has done another incredible job.)

Were you tempted to make the romance between Deanna and Jason work out?

No. I don't think even Deanna really wanted that. Her move on him was just a reaction to everything else going on, and a habit that a lot of girls (and women) have of believing that romantic or sexual interest from a guy is the answer to a host of self-esteem issues. Which is not really true. I think she wanted a connection, and didn't know how to ask for it in a non-romantic/sexual way. It's harder to say, "I'm scared. I'm lonely. I'm in pain and I don't know what's going to happen with my life" than to make an advance.

There is a wonderful cast of supporting characters who add to the depth and realism of this story. Two of my favorites are Lee and Michael. How did you come up with these characters and what do you think they add to Deanna's story?

Thanks. I love Michael, too. He was unplanned---just the guy who happened to be the manager when I started writing the "Deanna gets a job" scene. In earlier drafts, he was even more involved in listening to and advising Deanna, but he was in danger of getting a little Fairy Godmother-ish and I scaled back his role. Lee was a main character in a previous (unpublished) book. When Deanna showed up in that book, I decided she made a much more interesting protagonist, but I also liked the idea of Lee and the kind of unlikely friendships that sometimes happen between "good girls" and "bad girls" and the various ways that plays out.

I think that so many people grow up in households that are any thing but perfect. Stories like this will probably make alienated people feel less alone. Would you say you were setting out to teach lessons with this story, or did the story just happen to teach lessons?

I never set out to teach lessons, and I'm still not sure the story does exactly that. I just wanted to follow this one very human character and see what made her the way she was and how she was going to find some hope for her life and family. While I think it would be nearly impossible for an author to keep her worldview entirely out of her work, I don't think you can approach work with a theme or lesson that you want to impose and then construct a story around it. In a collection of essays on writing, Flannery O'Connor says: "When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. … In fiction, two and two is always more than four."

Alienation, the sense of being an outsider, is something I've felt most of my life so it comes out in my work; I can't help it. If it helps readers feel less alone (and I've heard from a number of readers who suggest that it does), that's the best kind of gravy. But it's not the motivation I start with when I sit down to write.

If you could have a long talk with thirteen-year-old Deanna, and seventeen-year-old Deanna, what might you tell her?

There are a few conversations I remember from my own adolescence, words of wisdom and encouragement from adults---the Michaels in my own life---who saw I was struggling. Basically those conversations amounted to them saying, "I know this time in your life sucks. But it will get better." And it did. There's no way out of being a teenager. You just have to go through it, and I don't know if there are that many helpful things to say that soften the blow. It's more about telling your own survival stories, I guess.

I once heard a speech given by the current Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia. He was talking specifically about teachers, but I think this also applies to artists of all kinds: he said to think of yourself as an emissary "from one of the many countries of adult life." Teenagers, especially, are asking themselves if it's a country they are going to want to visit, and what they might want to do once they get there. What kind of life is possible? He said that we---teachers, writers, community leaders---are modeling the possibilities of adulthood, and you honor the experience of young people but at the same time suggest, or insist, that it can be enlarged. To get back to your question, I think anyone who writes a YA novel is telling a survival story of some sort, and that in itself is a conversation with those thirteen or seventeen year-old versions of ourselves or our characters or the teen holding the book in her hands. As the tellers of those stories, we are acting as emissaries from the country of adulthood. We lived to tell. So will you.

Thank you so much. There's like a hundred more questions I would love to ask you about this book, maybe next time. Can you please take a minute to talk about your next project?

Thank you---I enjoyed it! I've got another YA novel coming out from Little, Brown in spring of 2008. It's called Sweethearts, and it's a story that began when a boy who had given me a ring in second grade contacted me a few years ago, when we were in our thirties. We became friends again and it was fascinating to me that our childhood stories were so similar, yet our lives since then had taken very different paths. I was also surprised at how deep our connection still was, thirty years later, based on just a few childhood years. I used that as a springboard for a fictional story about childhood sweethearts who are unexpectedly reunited in high school, and the kind of tension that might happen when loyalty and shared experience runs into present reality.


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