Class: Hi Margo
Margo: Hi
So this is my class… hello’s (introductions)
Class: Welcome to our class, we are the young adult literature class and they’ve read three of your stories and we have a few questions… Is How To Survive A Funeral true to your life?
Margo: I’d say it’s about 50% true, when I started writing fiction I guess the material I was drawn to was the material about my mother’s death. She died when I was in my teens, very suddenly. So all the emotional content of the book, the grief is very close to what I felt. The exact circumstances of the story are not true, so I’d say it’s about 50-50. The problem is that when you write autobiography everyone thinks it’s 100% true, so friends of my sister read the book and said “oh, I feel like I know you so much better.” So that’s the only problem with writing autobiography. I think for me the emotional contents of the characters usually tends to be pretty autobiographical, just because I’d say there’s a little bit of me in most of the characters that I write.
Class: I wanted to know something specify about the novel, the part where you wrote about Mia’s mom and Rolf – I wanted to know if that part was true to your life or if it was something you made up.
Margo: well actually, I’d say about 50% of that is true too. The germ of that story started when we went on a family vacation when I was a kid. And we met through family friends a girl who had my mother’s name. My mother was named Renée, and the girl was named Renée and her father was my mother’s first boy friend. So that part was true and I don’t know anything else about it, so the rest was made up. But it was true that we went and met a girl that my mother’s first boyfriend had named her after. So that was where that story sprang from.
Class: There’s humor in the stories we’ve read. Do you use humor is all of your writing or is it just specific to those stories?
Margo: I guess, as a reader I like it when things are funny – especially if you’re writing about a tragedy. And I think a lot of tragedies from when you’re growing up can be funny, and it’s so horrible that the only way to cope with it is actually laughing. And as a reader I always appreciate it when the author makes me laugh, so as a writer that’s always my goal, to try and make the story have some humor to it, it makes the whole thing more enjoyable to read.
Class: I was wondering if you were worried at all about Mia’s character portraying sort-of the Jewish-American-Princess stereotype. And if you were trying to do that when you were writing, or if it just kind of happened?
Margo: No I wasn’t trying to [laughs] I hope she’s not too much.
Class: Is your writing to help others grieve, or is it part of your grieving process at all? And who was your intended audience?
Margo: The thing about being a writer. I hate to think of anyone else actually reading it when I’m writing, because I think I could never be totally honest. So when I’m writing I actually don’t think about the reader at all, because then I would never write well. I think to write- one really can’t be self-conscious. And if you start feeling self-conscious you writing just won’t be honest or will start to ring false. So I don’t ever really think about the reader intentionally. But I do after it’s done, then I do hope that it will help someone that’s going through grief. For me, when my mom died, and then later my dad died as well, the first thing I did was go to the library and just look at books and read book after book. And the one that I found as helpful were not the self-help ones, which I find incredibly cheesy and annoying. There are books about mourning and I never found them helpful, but fiction novels or short stories actually were really helpful to me. So to sort of live an experience through someone else’s shoes, I found that really powerful. I’m really glad if my writing’s helped anyone. And I have received letters from people that have lost someone, and that’s meant a lot to me.
Class: I was wondering if you set out to inform the reader on a generational legacy of depression due to the Holocaust. And/or if it evolved organically along with your stories.
Margo: That’s an interesting question. I guess, its something that I find really interesting, and that part of the story is true too. My mother was born in Germany and we did lose a lot of our family in the holocaust and so, when she died there was a real hole. In that I have no relatives on that side of the family because they all were killed, so I am fascinated by the fact that the legacy really goes on. In a way that people don’t think about it. I feel like so much of the holocaust has become this movie, you know the Steven Spielberg movie type history, and that’s how people see it. They don’t really understand how it can affect people generations later. And that you just don’t have that side of your family so, that is something I’m really interested in as a writer- just how that history affects the current generation.
Class: Do you know anything more about Kenyan funerals?
Margo: Kenyan Funerals? [laughs] actually one of my friends from college was from Kenya, and she’s the one who told me they have a party a year after the person dies. So that’s where that came from. Yeah, I’ve never been to one, but that’s what I know about it.
Class: What is the most important lesson you learned from your parent’s death?
Margo: Oh geeze. Um. That’s a big one, gosh. You know what I hate to think of stuff like that as lessons. Just because I feel like so much of our culture is always… you know whenever something bad happens, I think maybe it’s a response. People always think ‘what’s the lesson in this bad thing, what’s the… you know what have you learned from it,’ and I don’t like to think of it as a lesson so much. It’s just, um something… that you learn from. I guess the biggest thing is that when you’ve lost someone it kind of changes the way you do everything. You sort of… you don’t take things for granted anymore. You don’t take the people that you love for granted in quite the same way. Only sometimes, sometimes you still take them for granted, but I do think it’s less so. Especially now that I have children of my own. Because I think my parents…um, I’m their age so I think I appreciate every moment in a way that I would not otherwise. I think when you lose someone that quickly, and you know, before you’re used to it… I think it makes you lose your sense that ‘everything will always be okay.’ And often I remember being, I mean you don’t think about it very often, but once you’re confronted with it, then it’s hard not to think about it. And you realize… and I put in the book, I mean its one page that you read, but it’s the book when she said, ‘when you’re close to death (and im just paraphrasing it but) you realize how easy it is to slip through. How easy it is to die,’ and once you do realize that I think you stop taking things for granted quite as much.
Class: Your work deals a lot with touchy subjects, and I’m wondering has your work ever been censored, have you ever had to go through censorship battles. And what do you think about literature being censored? Especially Y.A. literature?
Margo: It’s a tough call because within a cult called the writers community, there’s actually quite an ongoing conversation about it, for young adult writers. Because some people are very conscious not to put bad words in it, and you know I have the word ‘fuck’ on page two. But you know a lot of people don’t like that. A lot of, especially librarians or gatekeepers, and there’s teachers and parents, who are a huge market for buying the books. And you know if they don’t buy the books they can hurt the sales of an author and it can affect the amount you’re paying off of that, so some authors will be very careful not to include any bad language or not including sex scenes or anything. On the other end of the spectrum, a writing friend of mine David Levithan, I think you’re reading The Hunger Games and he’s the editor of that. And he’s also a writer himself, he wrote Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and a whole bunch of other books, you know if you ask him if he ever censors himself while writing, his answer is ‘fuck no!’ [laughs] you know he doesn’t think about… especially as a writer I believe the work is most important. You have to not worry too much about censorship. Beyond that there are definitely librarians and teachers that are not happy with that language or sexual scenes, but I feel like it’s their choice then – not to read it. But it is something that a lot of authors are thinking about, especially in this climate when you know the sales are difficult. It’s difficult to be a writer right now.
Class: How did you react when you found out your book was categorized under Young Adult and do you think this influenced your future writing?
Margo: I was simply surprised, because my agent thought it was an adult book. She actually sent it around as adult, and we had an offer from Random House Publishing’s editor in chief who thought it would do better as Y.A. which is actually happening to a lot of books now. There’s a book that I love by Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, and the same exact thing happened to him. So it’s happening to a lot of novels just because the young adult market is very strong and they’re selling a lot more books through young adults. So it’s happening to a lot of books these days.
Class: Could you talk a little bit about straddling those two different genres because you have published in both literary fiction and young adult, do you feel like you’re treated differently sometimes? Or do you find differences in leadership and authors, and the experience of being published?
Margo: Yeah it is tricky actually. At the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire I was talking to a writer, poet who writes for the New Yorker. And I was telling her my book was being published and she said ‘Oh that’s great, who’s publishing it?’ and I said ‘Random House is publishing it as Young Adult,’ and she said ‘Ugh, such a shame.’ [laughs] It’s this attitude among adult writers that can be very anti Y.A, very condescending. I wrote a piece for the New York Times about the whole experience of having a book that I thought was Adult getting published as Young Adult. And they interviewed Sherman Alexie who’s another author and he said ‘it was the most comments he’d ever received in his life, was for writing a young adult book’ and he couldn’t believe it just how people would say when he won the national book award for Young Adult Book, ‘Oh that’s too bad that you didn’t win adult.’ [laughs] so people can be very condescending about it. But the strange thing is, now that I’m part of the young adult writers there’s a lot of anti-adult literary sentiment. So you can’t win and I realize that I do both, so when I go to a lot of young adult writers they’re like ‘this adult writer sucks,’ so I just have to keep my mouth shut and go back and forth. But it’s interesting how it’s becoming that way and it’s very divided. The authors don’t mean to mingle as much and there’s very separate friendship. Even in Austin Texas, there’s a book festival here, there’s a separate party for the children’s and young adult book authors one night and then a joint party for all the authors for the festival. And some of the authors like Tom Perrotta, who wrote Election and Little Children, he started hanging out with our young adult book club and I thought that was really funny that he sort of joined over to the other side. So it’s a very strange cultural phenomenon.
Class: And you don’t think the quality of writing is different among the two groups right?
Margo: I think in both parties there’s a spectrum, there’s a lot of dumb, bad Y.A. books, but then there’s also very dumb bad Adult novels. I think there’s a spectrum because there’s really amazing, amazing young adult books and amazing adult novels too. I do think that the standards can be good for a great young adult novel… sometimes they’ll overlook beautiful writing, very lyrical beautiful sentences are not as important. Where as in an adult novel if the writing itself is not wonderful it’ll be looked down on immediately. In adult novels they forgive a lot of the books thought, for the slowness. Where as in Y.A. they wont forgive a slower story as much. But one thing if you think about Y.A. too, within the Y.A. genera everyone’s on the shelf right next to each other: Y.A. Mystery, or Y.A. Thriller, or Y.A. Romance and they’ll all be next to each other in one section. Whereas in adult they’ll keep separate genres so, that’s interesting too… that they’re two different genres.
Class: And what about your readers? How are they different?
Margo: There are actually still a lot of adults reading Y.A. so I still get a lot of reader mail from adults. But I do feel like there’s something really powerful about hearing from teenagers that read your book, because I know for me that the books I read at that age were so important and I remember more clearly and more passionately than I remember stuff I read a year ago. So I think that can be really powerful. And also just getting people hooked on reading is pretty amazing as a writer. Makes me feel really good. I mean having kids read and teens read, and I’d like to do picture books too someday and I think that it’s just so amazing to create books for children and teens.
Class: something that struck me was the fan mail you talked to me about, how is your fan mail different?
Margo: the mail I got from adults is just not as emotional, young adults can be so much more passionate. One of the letters that someone wrote to me after this book was published…a girl wrote to me who was fifteen and her mother had been diagnosed with cancer on Christmas Eve she had six tumors in her brain and her father had also had cancer, and she was facing the prospect of losing both of her parents. And it was just a really moving letter, and she said she was in a bookstore and her friend picked my book off the shelf and gave it to her. And she told me that it meant a lot to her to read it. And we’re still in touch, we still e-mail each other a lot, and that was years ago. She’s in college now and so it’s really powerful to be in touch with readers like that. And I don’t know that many adult writer friends who have that same relationship with their readers.
Teacher: one of the first assignments I gave my class was to go to a bookstore and check out the young adult book section, and write their impressions of it. And I’m sure you’ve seen them too, and I wanted you to talk a little bit about it… it’s really exploding, I feel like I see articles all the time about the state of Y.A. fiction, and how to get boys to read and about Twilight and The Hunger Games phenomenon, could you talk a little bit about the trends happening in the Young Adult fiction or the future of Y.A. Literature?
Margo: I think historically we’re in an interesting place, for Y.A. because it is exploding. I talked to a librarian and he said we’re in the renaissance of the Y.A. Literature. You know there’s an amazing amount of books, and amazing quality of books being published that haven’t been published before. It used to be that in this genre there were some amazing books… I’m thinking Robert Cormier I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War, these are really powerful books. And there’s Judy Blume, of course there’s a few books that stand out, but now there’s so much being published, and so much really high quality stuff. So that’s changed a lot. Honestly I think a lot of it is marketing, publishers have suddenly realized that it’s a really profitable huge market. And so a lot of writers who’ve done their MFA in English are made fun of or a lot of Y.A literary writers are looked down upon. And now it’s different, I just taught a writing workshop here in Austin and the students have sneakily been though adult MFA programs and written Y.A novels and published them as Y.A writers. So I think there’s specifically a Y.A. MFA programs that have formed, so it’s all changed a lot. Bigger issue is to see if it keeps up that way. Also a lot of books, I’ve heard from many publishers that To Kill A Mocking Bird and Catcher In The Rye, which were published as adult books, would be without a doubt published as Y.A. today. So there are a lot of books that could go either way. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is a great novel and that way actually published simultaneous in Adult and Y.A editions in the U.K. and Australia. And here it was published as Y.A., only because the editor who’s actually my publishing- won the auction. So they have a bunch of different publishers bid on it and adult publishing wanted to publish it, but Beverly- the vice president of Random House children, won the auction and had enough money to buy it, so that’s why the book is Y.A. and in that case if the adult publishers have enough money to buy it, it would’ve been adult, so it’s totally marketing.
Teacher: we’re following up the question on censorship, within Y.A. I brought in the article from publisher’s weekly blog, two writers were talking about how they had submitted a manuscript, it was a young adult post-apocalyptic novel.. and the story was that the agent asked if the gay character could be removed. Or if the gay-ness of the character could…
Margo: Oh, okay. I think I heard that story.
Class: And so they were talking about the pressures of young adult writers too in a way, to mainstream characters. You know, white-wash their identities their personalities, so that they wouldn’t have this difference. Which in a way we’ve been reading all this young adult literature that actually celebrates it. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that. Is that more so in Y.A or is that a concern in general fiction, where if you have a character that is gay and a minority, and so they just felt like- who could relate to this character? There’s this idea of relate-ability, which I think is pretty powerful in Young Adult Fiction. This idea of relating to the character. So.. any thoughts on that?
Margo: Yeah, I honestly think a lot depends on the editor. It is a very subjective business, and it’s hard to get… I mean you have to have an editor who believes in the manuscript and has a lot of power, so that if they like it they push it past the marketing and negotiate the profit and loss. Cheat on the stuff, so I imagine that the agent would go to the market meeting and say the right thing. All of it is all the crazy marketing stuff that drives it. That’s why I have to say I really like a lot of the small pressing studios, because they don’t have a lot of the same concerns. You know a lot of the major publishers are owned by Timer Warner and gigantic corporations. So publishing has become corporate. Whereas it used to be that a lot of the publishers were small boutique houses where they had a lot of autonomy. And now they’re owned by giant corporations, and in some ways it’s not too different from Hollywood studios, you can’t really picture them making a movie about a gay disabled character either. So I think in the same way, independent moviemakers have risen up and take more risks, I think the same thing is happening in publishing. Some editors are visionaries and some are not, and they will not think that way, and it’s just such a subjective business. But things do fall through the cracks and sometimes they don’t really know what’s going to be a big hit or not.
Class: So one of the young adult assignments for the class was to create a Y.A. book collection. So we were hoping you would help us out and we’ve nominated some books as we read as kids and so we would like to ask you what you read as a kid and would like to nominate for our collection.. what Y.A. authors inspired you when you were growing up?
Margo: Of course! Some of my favorites.. I loved Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes, which was also about a teen who loses her father. And its one of my favorites, I love that book. I love Diary of Anne Frank, which was published as adult actually. But that’s one of my all time favorites, that book meant so much to me. And more recently, I mentioned Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You is one of my favorite Y.A. novels that have been published recently. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful book. It has an interesting back-story too, he submitted the book to his publisher and he’s written a lot of stories for the New Yorker in the eighty’s in Teen Voice, and it was not a common thing. And they said ‘now days that’s not adult anymore,’ and he was like ‘what are you talking about I published my stuff in the New Yorker,’ and they said not anymore. And so that book was Y.A and it sold better than all of his adult books. So it’s very strange, it’s hard to figure out the marketing thing. I really love that novel, so I nominate that. I love Sherman Alexie’s An Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian, Moraine House Anderson’s Seek is a beautiful book, and there’s this book by Rebecca Stead which won the Newberry, it’s called When You Reach Me, even for younger kids, but for teens it’s a really beautiful book. It’s written as sort of homage to Wrinkle in Time. What did you guys put in the list?
Class: so some of those are already on our list, but… The Weetzie Bat series, His Dark Materials, we have a lot of different fantasy, sci-fi… and then we also have: The Kite Runner, Cirque du Freak, The Basketball Diaries, Blankets, Chocolate War, A Horse And His Boy, Ringer, Across the Universe, The Giver, The Adventures Of The Blue Avenger, Ender’s Game, White Oleander. That’s what we have so far, we also have some graphic novels in there, that we will give to this high school which does not have a library.
Margo: That’s so great!
Class: Well, thank you very much Margo, for talking to us!
Margo: Aw, Thank You!
