Interview with Alison McGhee

Alison McGhee is the author of numerous books for adults, young adults, and children. Her YA books include What I Leave Behind, Where We Are, and All Rivers Flow to the Sea.

Natalie Martell: You write for all different ages of readers. At what stage of your writing process do you know which age category the story will fall into? Do you know right away that it’s for, say, a middle grade or young adult audience? Has it ever changed throughout the writing process?

Alison McGhee: There are themes that just transcend all age. Within genres, like writing a picture book, I will often gear them as much toward adults as for young children because it’s usually the adults that are reading those books to children. So to hold those two disparate audiences in mind is kind of a balancing act.

Other times, an idea or image or event will sort of transfix me, and I will know I want to write a book around the feeling that results from that experience. Sometimes I have just written the book and then it’s published as either an adult book or YA. I don’t see a lot of difference between the two. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen three of my books published here as either adult or YA and then be sold internationally and published as the counterpart in other countries. So a book that is published here as adult will pop up elsewhere as YA or vice versa. That jives with my own feelings that these categories elide and glide into each other. Books I loved when I was a child—if they were published now, they would be classified as either adult or YA or even middle grade.

While I’m writing, I tend to not think too much about the categories, and then the book will end up being better suited for one than another. Maybe it’s that I resist categorization. Outwardly, I just smile, but inwardly, I really chafe when someone describes me as a novelist or a children’s book writer. I just want to be a writer. As I see more and more categories being invented, in a way it’s stifling.

As an adult, I read all the time, and I don’t distinguish at all what I’m reading. I just finished this incredible British writer named Penelope Fitzgerald that I just discovered. She’s an insane writer and so great. I realized that she’s dead, which is upsetting to me. She began writing in her late 60’s and won the Booker and she’s just an incredible writer. Now I’m reading Double Fudge by Judy Blume. I do not distinguish—I’ll read any book. So I’m kind of this outlier who chafes against the difference between middle grade, YA, adult, new adult.

NM: I think pushing against those categorizations is important. It’s a valuable perspective to have and to share because other people are thinking about this too. The categories weren’t created by writers, but by publishing companies. It reminds me of my conversation with Nicole Kronzer—she talked about how these gaps appear in publishing, where certain ages aren’t written about because they don’t fit neatly into the categories.

AM: I don’t see what purpose they serve. As we grow and change throughout our lives, and we’re trying to make the world more inclusive and more understanding and more welcoming, why narrow down? Why say, “This book is for this particular age”? Because they’re not, really. How else do we grow and empathize as children unless we’re reading all different kinds of books? I guess it disheartens me a little that everything becomes more and more stratified. I don’t think that’s what the world needs right now, or ever.

NM: I agree, and I like that you said there are certain themes that transcend all ages. I think as writers we’re compelled by recurring questions and ideas. I’m curious if there are certain themes that you find yourself coming back to as a writer, maybe that you’ve explored for different ages?

AM: Oh yes. Sometimes I joke that I just write the same book over and over, whether it’s for a five-year-old or a 90-year-old. I actually remember being a baby, and I was wearing diapers and these rubber pants. I could feel the rubber pants making that rubber pants sound against my legs, and I was climbing up the stairs after my mother. She was holding a bucket of paint in her hand. Crawling up after her, I looked out through the stair railings and thought—it couldn’t have been words because I was a baby—but I remember the feeling was: “Remember this, because it’s all going to go so fast. Remember everything.”

That feeling has always been with me. I must’ve been born with it. As an adult, I asked my mother, “Did you ever paint these brown stairs when I was a baby?” She said, “Yes. We had these hideous brown stairs, and I painted them gray. I was pregnant with your sister, so you would’ve been 13 months old.” So that memory is for real, and it’s influenced who I am. Whatever you’re doing in this life, it’s a long game where you want to make the most of everything, whether it’s relationships, places, or things that are dear to you.

“So I reach out in my words to the loneliness in other people in an attempt to be that unseen connection. Whoever is reading the book, this is my gift to you in our shared aloneness.”

Most of my books have that theme at heart, that life goes by very fast. Things are going to happen to you that you don’t want to happen, that you would never choose to happen, and what are you going to do in the wake of that? How are you going to transfigure your life to absorb what has happened, and keep going as a person who is changed by that in this new world?

NM: How do you approach more challenging topics in your writing for young people, and why do you think it’s important to represent those kinds of situations and experiences in nuanced ways for younger readers?

AM: As a former child, I have tremendous respect for children of all ages. I never want to talk down to them or assume that they’re incapable of understanding and coping with the big things, you know? Death, loss, a transforming world, difficult relationships with parents or people close to them, bullying—children are aware of those things whether we write about them or not, so why not write about life in a way that gives a child a feeling of comfort and that they’re not alone?

Every book I’ve ever written is an attempt to unlonely the lonely. I think everyone is lonely—no matter how loved you are, no matter how you look on the outside, there’s a core of loneliness. There certainly is in me. My life is filled with love and joy, but I’m always lonely. So I reach out in my words to the loneliness in other people in an attempt to be that unseen connection. Whoever is reading the book, this is my gift to you in our shared aloneness. That’s my goal with every book, whether it’s purely for fun, just to make someone laugh, or whether it’s a serious and internal look at something.

“On the outside we age in this very linear fashion, but on the inside, we’re all the ages we ever were, combining and recombining endlessly.”

NM: What do you find is most exciting and difficult about writing from a young person’s perspective?

AM: It’s easy for me to access a deep emotional well. It’s more challenging for me to access pure joy. Sometimes if I’m writing a book that is just to make kids laugh, I have to kind of trick myself back into those moments of laughing until you can’t stop. I would say that’s my biggest challenge writing for children—tapping into the lightness of emotion.

I don’t find it hard to be in a child’s point of view. On the outside we age in this very linear fashion, but on the inside, we’re all the ages we ever were, combining and recombining endlessly. You’re back in fifth grade standing at the top of the stairs at recess, and then you’re walking down the aisle at your wedding, and then you’re remembering being born—it’s all there. I have this image of a telephone operator from old movies. They’re sitting and plugging in their chords to different telephone lines, and I feel like that’s what we all do instinctively.

NM: I love that. Even though many things are different about being a teenager today than when I was a teenager or when you were a teenager, there are these through lines and things that are continuous about the experience that you can tap into at any stage of your life.

AM: Times always change, technology always changes, transportation always changes—all of it. My books have never been very contemporary in terms of the outer world, but there are through lines, as you say, that are internal and that don’t change. They become exacerbated or externalized depending on the technology of the day. But there’s always the emotional core that really stays the same.

NM: We know as writers it’s really important to keep readers engaged in a story, and maybe it’s especially important for younger readers. I’m wondering about some techniques you’ve used to maintain the forward momentum of your stories or to engage young readers.

AM: Make them funny. I have a couple of graphic-style books, too. For kids who don’t really like to read but are drawn to the visual, they love graphics. Each book I write probably has a different readership. There was one YA I published a few years ago that was a very constrained book in terms of word count. It was 100 chapters that were 100 words each. I loved writing that book. Afterward I would hear from all these teachers like, “That book is the only one that so-and-so has ever finished.” I realized it’s because there were so few words. Every single page had to advance the story so much.

That’s been interesting to think about, especially today where attention for children is so fragmented. It’s reassuring and soothing to spend time doing one thing, like cooking slowly, or going for a long walk, or watching one TV show for half an hour, or reading a book. There’s not nearly enough of that now. Every child I know is screen-obsessed. And most of the adults I know are screen-obsessed. So that one book, which is only 10,000 words, had the effect of slowing down a little. I thought, “We’ll use the era in which we are living, but subvert it somehow.” Inadvertently, that’s what I did with that book.

I’m thinking, now, of other ways I can harness the power or lack of power that we live in now to accomplish the opposite purpose. I am a very high-strung and intense person, and I am constantly coping with my own personality by building slowness into my day. I’m thinking a lot about that in terms of writing. How can I do this very subtly and invisibly, but in a purposeful way?

NM: Have any of your characters surprised you throughout the writing process?

AM: They always surprise me. They always do things I didn’t want them to do—well, didn’t expect them to do. If you’re a fiction writer, you create these people, and in some ways that’s all you need to do. You just write down what they do in their lives because people’s lives are endlessly fascinating. This one book that comes out next May, the main character was dead. The reader didn’t know it, but she’s talking to them from beyond. I wrote that book like three times, and then it turns out she’s not dead. She’s alive. The whole book entirely changed. That always happens to me with books, and I’m like, “Whatever.”

[laughter]

NM: Just go with it.

AM: Let me write it yet again. 

NM: I think it can also be a sign of the characters taking on lives of their own in ways that will allow them to jump off the page as real people. If you’re trying to force them…

AM: You can’t force them, even if you might want to.

NM: The last thing I want to ask about is which books or writers for young people have most influenced your writing.

AM: As a child, I didn’t really read Beverly Cleary, but as an adult, I’m trying to read all her stuff. She’s seriously so good, so I recommend her in general. Contemporary, I would say Markus Zusak, who wrote The Book Thief.

NM: I love that book. It’s heartbreaking.

AM: So heartbreaking, so beautiful. I would say Jason Reynolds, some of his books I absolutely love. M.T. Anderson, Nina LaCour, Kevin Henkes. I love their work. Matt de la Peña—I really love his stuff, too.

Learn more about Alison McGhee and her books by visiting her website: https://alisonmcghee.com