You’d Be Home Now: Q & A with Kathleen Glasgow

You’d Be Home Now (Delacorte Press, September 28, 2021) is already a STAR. Kirkus calls the latest novel by bestselling author Kathleen Glasgow “A gut-wrenching look at how addiction affects a family and a town,” and “Necessary, important, honest, loving, and true.” Also praised by Booklist, and School Library Journal, this fantastic find according to Shondaland is at the top of my TBR list. I devoured Glasgow’s first two novels, Girl in Pieces and How to Make Friends with the Dark, and am especially excited for her latest work (which, for better or worse, makes me think of my own childhood). I have no doubt it will resonate with young adults and not so young readers alike. Here’s a brief description of You’d Be Home Now:

No one knew just how bad Joey Ward’s addiction was until the night Candy MontClaire died. Four months later, he’s back from rehab, hoping for a fresh start in a town that doesn’t know how to forgive. His sister, Emory, is tasked as his keeper. Because in a family with a “beautiful one” (her glamorous and outgoing older sister Maddie) and a “bad one” (Joey), Emmy has always been “the good one.” Of course she’ll keep her brother safe. She loves Joey more than anything. She’ll do anything to keep him alive.

But what if love isn’t enough to save someone?

Glasgow was kind enough to do an email Q & A for my blog. Read on to learn more about her latest novel and her writing life.

What was the spark for You’d Be Home Now? And did you know from the get-go you wanted—or had to—write about a teen girl tasked with picking up the pieces after her brother’s drug addiction?

You’d Be Home Now was inspired by Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town. It’s a loose reimagining of Grover’s Corners and what a town like that might be like today. If Wilder wrote the play today, I have no doubt the opioid crisis would be part of the plot, as this epidemic has ravaged families, towns, and communities. I chose to write the book from Emmy’s POV because there’s collateral damage in addiction: families, particularly siblings, who often become overlooked, overwhelmed, and exhausted in the face of a sibling’s addiction. The impact of addiction touches everyone in a family and really does a number on their mental health. They deserve a story, too.

I’m intrigued by the idea of examining who we are and what role we play within our families and our communities, and how that impacts our relationships and self-perception. I, for example, have always been a rule-follower who sought others’ approval, and who was always considered to be ‘the good one.” My older brother who was frequently in trouble was deemed “the bad one.” (We’ve been estranged for more than 15 years, and obviously haven’t worked through those narratives—maybe someday?!) What made you want to explore this idea in your novel, and did you have any revelations (in general or about your own life) along the way?

Everyone, for better or for worse, gets slotted into a role in a family: “the good one,” “the troubled one,” “the beautiful one,” “the difficult one.” It’s endless. But it’s not who each kid is, it’s who they are being defined as, and that’s not fair to any of them, because it makes them suppress emotions and not feel comfortable moving out of the role they’ve been assigned, if that makes sense. In YOU’D BE HOME NOW, Emmy is “the good one.” Quiet, rule-follower, caretaker of Joey since she was very small. In essence, because of this role, she’s never really discovered who she really is, or what she really wants out of life, or even how to get it. She doesn’t have an identity she forged on her own; it was given to her by her family. And of course, she wants to help her brother. But at what cost? She also wants to live a life of small, normal joys, like having a boyfriend, or going to dance. Those things make her feel guilty, though, because how can she enjoy herself while her brother’s life is disintegrating? I tried to be very careful in the book about Emmy’s journey with Joey, because she’s at the very beginning of this struggle with Joey, and many people (especially older readers) have reached a sort of end with the Joeys in their lives: they can no longer give all they’ve got; they’re exhausted. And that is valid! The question is learning to set your boundaries: what you can do, what you can’t do, because in the end, you also have to take care of yourself. It’s Emmy’s struggle in the book to realize this. I wanted to show the process of taking care of yourself, too. And to stop assigning people roles that don’t actually define who they are.

How was the process of writing this third novel different from that for Girl in Pieces, and How to Make Friends with the Dark?

Well, it was very hard to write with Thornton Wilder in the room! But I eventually overcame that, because the story became its own. I would say writing this book was different because Girl in Pieces and How to Make Friends with the Dark are pure emotion—Charlie and Tiger’s POVs are very interior and heavy. I needed to make Emmy’s narrative somewhat less intense than my other books to stretch the story beyond Emmy and into the town and the school to show how the tentacles of addiction ensnare everyone, not just the person struggling with addiction. An Instagram poster in the book called Mis_Educated is a character in the book and through their posts, a reader also gets a chance to hear from kids in the town of Mill Haven (in the comment section) about what’s really happening and how they feel about their lives.

How has the pandemic changed your writing life in terms of practices and inspiration?

I don’t know if the pandemic has changed my writing practice or inspiration so much as it has changed me, slowly, over time. I’m already an introvert and being even more isolated during the pandemic led me back into a deep depression. I wasn’t writing at all for several months, actually, until a joke between me and fellow author Liz Lawson (The Lucky Ones) turned into . . . a book. I needed something fun and different, I needed something to look forward to every day, and so did Liz, and those Twitter DMs between us eventually turned into a mystery called The Agathas, which comes out May 2022. Writing that book quietly with Liz, with no one watching (we didn’t tell our agents for a long time), really lifted me to a better place. And it’s a different tone of book for us, as both Liz and I tend toward heavier topics. We kept everything speedy, and fun, and about friendship (two teen girls become unlikely detectives and even more unlikely, become friends) and it was really a balm for me.

What has been the most rewarding part of being a young adult novelist? What has been the most challenging part?

It’s rewarding in the sense that I hear every day from readers who have discovered Girl in Pieces and How to Make Friends with the Dark that those books have touched them deeply. I can’t really articulate what it means to know your book has impacted someone’s life in a deep and meaningful way. It makes me want to cry, actually! I’m grateful for that interaction. Writing is often hard and lonely, and sometimes you just don’t know if the story will land, especially with teens. I would say a challenging part is trying to do my best by teen readers and to articulate the adolescent experience in an authentic and believable way. And to give them a good and satisfying story to read.

What advice (in terms of craft or process) do you have for writers just starting out?

I don’t know if I’m an expert on anything having to do with writing, actually! I just try and write when I can, when a story keeps nudging me and won’t quit. I think in practical terms of craft, reading widely and often is the best teacher. You can learn from re-reading books you love: how the author structured this, how they handled that, how they went from A to B. I will say that you’ll learn what works for you in the beginning and then as you continue to write, you’ll improve through practice. I think the hardest thing for beginning writers is how to start. Like, literally, how to find time to sit in a chair (or couch, or bed, or coffee shop) and . . . get those first few words down. There’s a real fear: who am I to call myself a writer? Well, if you write, you’re a writer! And there’s a fear of: what if this isn’t any good? My answer to that is: what is good? One person might like your story, one might not. You can’t control that. But the most important thing to remember is, those things are abstract in the beginning: if you don’t sit down and write that story, no one will be able to read it. And believe me, someone wants to! Of that, I’m sure. We writers have a hard time getting out of our own way! We can imagine a million things might happen after we write a story and send it into the world, but if we don’t write it first, we will never know if any of those million things come to fruition.

What books, TV shows, and music have you most enjoyed during the pandemic (and more recently)?

I tend to have the television on in the background when I write and I wrote the entirety of You’d Be Home Now with Grey’s Anatomy on an endless loop. The shows I watched in the past two and half years when I WASN’T writing include (and I’m sorry on some of these because often it takes me years to watch a show everyone watched fifteen years ago): Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Wilds, The Sopranos (could not finish, too many dream sequences), The Wire, 30 Rock, The Crown, Breaking Bad, Big Mouth, Forensic Files, Cold Cases, PEN15, Broadchurch. Some of my favorite books to read this past year were: The Lucky Ones (Liz Lawson); Never Saw You Coming (Erin Hahn); Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf (Hayley Krischer); When We Were Strangers (Alex Richards); That Weekend (Kara Thomas); The Project (Courtney Summers); Off the Record (Camryn Garrett). That’s just a small list. My music listening is all over the place, but lately I can’t stop listening to a song by Bright Eyes called “At the Bottom of Everything.” A weird thing about me is that while I don’t listen to music AS I write, I actually can’t start physically writing a book until I have everything in my head AND I have found the song that kind of drives the story, and “At the Bottom of Everything” is the song that drives what I hope will be my fifth book. (Girl in Pieces was “Kamera” by Wilco; How to Make Friends with the Dark was “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles; You’d Be Home Now was “Let You Down,” by NF).

You’re a master storyteller, especially because you manage to inject hope into all of your stories no matter how raw, emotional, and painful they may have been to write or read. What’s one thing you’ve learned through your life and/or writing—especially during these especially challenging times—that has helped you persevere and continue to push through and make your art?

Honestly, I don’t know what else I would do if I couldn’t write. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be, a writer. And stories are what keep us all going, right? When do we ever not need a good story?

About Kathleen Glasgow: She is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces, How to Make Friends with the Dark, You’d Be Home Now, and the upcoming The Agathas (with Liz Lawson) (Delacorte, May 2022). She received her undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico and her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. 

Check out my previous Q & A with Kathleen Glasgow for the launch of How to Make Friends in the Dark. And learn more about Glasgow and her work on her website. Her wonderful work is available wherever books are sold.

 

Author Spotlight: Q & A with YA Writer Kelly deVos

 

I’ve been following author Kelly DeVos’s career and enjoying her work and social media posts for years. I even had the pleasure of meeting the young adult writer at a pre-pandemic SCBWI conference in Los Angeles. Her latest novel, Eat Your Heart Out (Razorbill, June 2021), is smart, funny, satirical and original. Here’s a description of the novel, an Amazon Editor’s Pick in the Best Young Adult category:

Eat Your Heart Out follows a group of six teenagers who are disgruntled at the prospect of being shipped off to a fancy fat camp during winter break. When they arrive at camp, they discover things are worse than they thought. The place is crawling with zombies. They may be the only six survivors and they have to both escape and figure out what’s really up with the mysterious pharmaceutical company running the camp.

I am thrilled to share this Q & A with deVos to celebrate her new novel as well as her timely and important work on body positivity, fat positivity and fat representation.

Your debut novel, Fat Girl on a Plane (Harlequin Teen, 2018), was written after an incident you experienced when you were about to board a flight. What happened, and how did it evolve into a young adult book? 

Yes! I got the idea to write the book after I was asked to buy a second seat on a flight to Salt Lake City. Right around that time, I was contemplating giving my dream of becoming a published author another shot but I also happened to be working on setting up a photoshoot with Project Runway Season Four contestant, Keith Bryce. After leaving the show, Keith went on to set up a successful photography and wardrobe studio and I was headed there for a shoot.

I arrived at the Phoenix airport for my flight to Utah. The opening scene in my book was inspired pretty directly by what actually happened to me. I was told that I’d need to purchase a second seat. A lot of panicked questions raced through my mind. Could I afford the second seat? Did they even have one available? But most of all: Should I even go on the trip? For a moment, I couldn’t help but think that it would be less trouble and less humiliating to just stay home. I reminded myself that I had done a ton of work behind the scenes to make this shoot happen and I had as much right as anyone to be there. So, I got on the plane. But that experience was the genesis of my book. I kept wondering. Does fatphobia make us feel like we’re unworthy of pursuing our own dreams? I wanted to write not only about the way fat people are treated but also about how those negative experiences impact the choices that we make.

What inspired your subsequent novels (which include the duology Day Zero and Day One as well as Eat Your Heart Out)? How did your writing processes differ for each of these (and/or compared to your debut)?

After FAT GIRL came out, I was supposed to be working on another YA contemporary book, but I was having a lot of trouble. The 2016 election was in full swing. My awareness of a lot of issues had changed and, for me, the social and political climate, didn’t put me in a place where I was able to focus on upbeat writing. I wanted to change what I was doing. As I was changing to writing thrillers, I found I really liked that process quite a lot and I wanted to go more in that direction. I’ve always loved horror movies so I decided to lean into that genre and write EAT YOUR HEART OUT, which was such a blast to work on.

What is it about summer camp that made you want to write about it? What do you most remember about those days, and how did those experienced impact you as a person and a writer?

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money and I only got to go to summer camp once, but it was honestly the best experience ever. As a child, I was really scared of spiders. I still don’t like them now, but at that time I was absolutely terrified. The camp I went to had these pretty basic, VERY rustic, wooden cabins where six or eight kids could sleep on bunkbeds. The very first night I found an enormous spider in my bed and almost got hysterical.

They moved me into the cabins that they had for adults which were (to a ten-year-old) super luxurious. There was a private pool and a kitchen with free snacks and a queen size bed and air conditioning. It was fabulous. The other kids thought I was some kind of celebrity or something. I’d be out at camp during the day, doing arts and crafts and sitting by the campfire and then I’d go back to the fancy part and swim and snatch Oreos. I took a lot of inspiration from that experience into EAT YOUR HEART OUT. It was a camp setting for people who almost wanted to pretend to be camping rather than actually be roughing it.

You’ve written thoughtfully about body positivity in several publications, most notably The New York Times (May 2018). How has your thinking about it evolved since writing that article? And how does this translate into the messages you share (without being didactic of course) through your novels? 

Body positivity, fat positivity and fat representation are all topics that are very near and dear to my heart. I continue to feel that there should be space for nuance in how we handle these issues, particularly in fiction. But I feel like what I have had to learn is that, as fat people, we’re not all in the same place in our journey to self-acceptance and self-love. So, I have tried to proceed with a lot more sensitivity to try to make sure that my material finds an audience who’s able to and interested in engaging with it. Using content warnings, describing the plot of my books very accurately and making sure that books that contain fatphobia (even just to condemn it) are marketed to prepared readers are things that I’ve gotten much more serious about.

How has the pandemic impacted your writing, and how do you balance that with book promotion?  

Possibly because I have been writing horror, I actually got quite a bit of writing done. Feelings of mortal terror have been coming quite naturally! During the pandemic, I’ve struggled with what, if anything, I could do to effectively promote my books. Many of the things I would have done in the past, like bookstore or library events, haven’t been paused due to COVID. In terms of balance, I try to prioritize writing. Beyond that, for promotion, I try to focus on things I enjoy. I mainly stay on social media channels I like and do things that are fun. That way, I am always satisfied with the use of my time.

What has been the best part of writing for young people? 

Reading was so important to me growing up and I love the idea that my books are available for teen readers. I think the best part is getting to see my books find their way into the hands of teens and hope that they impact the readers’ lives in some way.

Any writing resources (books, podcasts, etc.) that you can’t live without? 

I love Outlining Your Novel and the workbook that goes with it from K.W. Weiland. She also has a fantastic website (https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com) full of a ton of free resources for writers. For podcasts, I listen to What Book Hooked You with Brock Shelley which I find fascinating because authors talk about the books that inspired them to write. I also really like Writer Writer Pants on Fire with Mindy McGinnis. I’m a big fan of her work and I think she often has really interesting topics and guests.

Please share any advice that has helped you in your journey from writer to published author. 

A couple things have really helped me. First of all, I’ve made some great friends who are writers and who really understand what the process is like. From being in the query trenches to finally have a book on shelves, it helps so much to have a support system. Second, I try to keep moving forward. I keep a couple of projects going at the same time and I try to do things to improve my craft.

I have one last question that’s completely tangential to book talk. I learned on your website that you have a sticker collection! One of the things I personally loved about sleep away/overnight camp was sharing with others and organizing my sticker and stationary collections. What are your tips for those (including me) who might want to revisit/reintroduce the popular pastime into our lives? 

I basically live for stickers!! Just kidding. But I do like them an awful lot. Growing up, I absolutely loved all that Lisa Frank stuff. A few years ago, I saw an ad online for a sticker club and it dawned on me that I could collect stickers now too. Whenever I travel anywhere I pick up stickers and there are some local boutiques here in Phoenix that have incredible offerings. I was a member of the Pipsticks club for a while but I had to pause that a bit because I was running out of places to store my stuff.

Kelly deVos is from Gilbert, Arizona, where she lives with her high school sweetheart husband, amazing teen daughter and superhero dog, Cocoa. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. When not reading or writing, Kelly can typically be found with a mocha in hand, bingeing the latest TV shows and adding to her ever-growing sticker collection.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times as well as on Vulture, Salon, Bustle and SheKnows. Her debut novel, Fat Girl on a Plane, was named one of the “50 Best Summer Reads of All Time” by Reader’s Digest magazine. 

Learn more about deVos on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. You can also learn more about her work on Goodreads. You can purchase Eat Your Heart Out from  AmazonB&N, Indiebound or wherever books are sold.