Jennifer Mason-Black is the author of the new young adult novel Sometimes the Girl. She also has written the YA novel Devil and the Bluebird. She lives in Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write
Sometimes the Girl, and how did you create your character Holiday?
A: Let me preface this by
saying I’ve never read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, so what follows has
nothing to do with its literary merits. What interested me about its
publication was the reader response.
The connection so many people
have to To Kill a Mockingbird is deeply personal. To be confronted with an
apparent earlier draft in which beloved Atticus Finch is openly racist felt to
many like a betrayal.
Very quickly, the majority
narrative became that publication of Go Set a Watchman was purely an exploitation
of Harper Lee, now in her late 80s and likely misled into signing the contract.
Surely she would never have chosen to let the world see her early work, surely
To Kill a Mockingbird was the book she’d meant to write and deserved be her
sole legacy.
For me, that presented
several questions.
First, what role does ageism
plays in such a situation? Second, what occurs in the space between an earlier
work, like Go Set a Watchman, and a published version rebuilt from the ground
up? Third, in a situation in which a writer subjugates their creativity to
their editor’s desire, how might that affect their future art? And fourth, who
should determine an artist’s legacy?
Of course, that’s not the
origin of Holiday and her part of the story. Some of Holi is autobiographical.
For example, the town she grew up in—Amherst—is my hometown, and the love she
feels for it is my own, though less complicated. I also was a young writer who
quit writing due to a mentor’s opinions, in my case for a very long time.
But Holi is her own person. I
wish I could say that there’s a method to how I develop characters. The reality
is that I stumble across a piece of life—a hat left behind, an awkward
interaction, a passing cloud—that provides me entry into who they are. Then I
just write and write until they come clear to me.
This time I had a head start
because Sometimes the Girl is actually connected with two other books of mine,
one published, one not. I already had a description of her and a sense of mystery.
These made it easier to begin.
Q: How would you describe the
dynamic between Holi and your character Elsie, an older writer?
A: I think Elsie is very
conflicted about how to relate to this young woman writer, clearly wounded in
some way, that shows up on her doorstep.
Elsie’s bitterness about
writing is so deep that it cannot help but drive her to discourage Holi from
following the same path. At the same time, Holi’s presence resuscitates some of
Elsie’s feelings about writing—that passionate space in which nothing else
matters—and what she’d lost.
The truth, though, is that
most of the time they are communicating on different levels. Elsie’s need for
privacy comes from her fame, but also from the suffering through which that
fame came to be.
When she tells Holi that
writing is no job for a woman, it originates from a place of history and
experience and loss. When Holi hears it, she understands it as the words of an
old woman who parrots outdated beliefs about women’s work being less than
men’s.
In the end, what Holi longs
to hear is that she is a writer, that she should continue to write. What Elsie
wants, I think, is to covertly communicate her own pain and save Holi the same,
while also to believe the world has changed enough that Holi might succeed with
her writer’s heart intact.
Q: How was the novel’s title
chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Excellent, an easy
question! Sometimes the Girl comes from a conversation I wrote very early on.
In it, Blue Riley, the
singer/songwriter protagonist from my first book, Devil and the Bluebird, says
that in books sometimes the girl gets the boy and sometimes she gets the girl,
but sometimes the girl gets herself, and that’s what she—Blue—wants in a story.
There are so many great books
that center romance, but Holi’s story isn’t meant to be one of them. She’s been
so tied up in the lives and needs of the people she loves and her own fears
about the future; the central question here isn’t whether she gets the girl but
whether she gets herself. Whether she finds her own compass, whether she
reclaims herself as an artist.
I agree with Blue: sometimes
these stories are exactly the ones we need.
Q: The writer Mary McCoy said
of the book, “Mason-Black never shies away from the hard questions and harder
answers in this devastating, engrossing puzzle of a story.” What do you think
of that description?
A: Something I knew from the
beginning of my drafting process was that I had to face a question that I, as
author, didn’t want to answer.
There were plenty of other
questions along the way: how to allow close relationships to evolve, is it
possible to move honestly into the future without healing the past, how do we
trust ourselves in a world where so many benefit from our self-doubt.
We all grapple with those at
some point, and the answers we find, as obvious as they can seem from the
outside, are often hard won.
But this one question…I
agonized over it as much as the characters involved did. Finally, though, I remembered
that Holi’s grandfather is right: the hard thing isn’t knowing the answer, it’s
following through on it. I knew the solution, both within the context of the
story and in my own personal beliefs. I was just afraid to commit to it.
So, I think Mary McCoy gives
a fairly accurate description. Life is full of hard questions and
answers—without them we would experience static existences, exiting the world
more or less the same as we entered it—and I wanted the book to be full of
life.
And on a personal level, I
also confronted a hard question, and it did force me to grow, and for that I am
thankful.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: In life, sending my
youngest child off to college!
In writing, I’m returning to
where I began, working on an adult novel with some magic, some apocalypse, and
a bit more reality than I’d like.
It revolves around a magical
healer, who grows from a child surviving by bartering her talent, to a teen
living a pampered existence built on her complicity in the violent theft of
magic from children, to a woman on a quest to return what she stole while being
hunted by a private army intent on seeing she doesn’t succeed.
It contains environmental
collapse and sailboats crossing drought-stricken plains and a dog named Jack
and a circus and the power of community.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: This is a dangerously
broad question. A few years ago, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I wrote
lots of Caring Bridge updates, which were read mostly by colleagues of his that
I’d never met.
One of them responded to
every post. I was exhausted and terrified, and the kids and I felt adrift and
alone, and he replied each time with encouragement. Not false cheer—support
arising from intimate knowledge of the struggle we faced.
He told me his wife kept us
in their church’s prayer circle, he complimented my writing, he told me he was
so happy about our good reports. And he told me that he knew he tended to
overshare.
So, perhaps that story
contains the two important things I’d like you to know.
One, that I believe humanity
is in a dire place, one where despair is easy and emotional shutdown is the
choice so many people make.
At the same time, I think
connecting to one another on a human level, with stories, with compassion, with
genuine love, makes a difference in our ability to survive and to take action
toward not just survival, but profound, sustained, positive change.
And two, I overshare. On that
note: coming up on three years cancer free!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb