When you get the opportunity to interview an author like Sarah Dessen, you seize it, even if it means driving miles out of the city in heavy traffic on a rainy day.
Saint Anything is Sarah’s twelfth (yes, 12th!) book, and to say that’s a huge accomplishment in the ever-changing and growing Young Adult industry is an understatement. In the first week of Saint Anything’s release, it landed on the New York Times Bestsellers list, meaning that Sarah’s stories are just as valued today as they were back when I was in high school in the early aughts.
It was a pleasure speaking with Sarah about an array of topics at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL. A transcript of our conversation can be read below.
Gabrielle Bondi: Congratulations on your twelfth book, the New York Times, and all that!
Sarah Dessen: It has been an exciting week!
How does it feel?
It’s great. I’m happy to still be relevant. I think after 12 books you don’t know where you’re going to be, and YA has changed so much since my first book came out, and I’m really happy. I’m thrilled the book hit as high as it did on the list yesterday. And I’m just hoping that it kind of keeps going.
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That was actually one of my questions. How has YA changed since you’ve began writing? Because your books started coming out with I was actually a teenager, and you were one of the few—I mean the YA section is HUGE now, but back then, it was only one shelf long.
It was totally different. There wasn’t a teen section; there wasn’t even a YA section. There was a children’s section, and the YA books were sort of shelved in their section. So it was my book, then Goodnight Moon. It was really Harry Potter who changed that. Harry Potter, then Twilight, and people started to realize, like booksellers and librarians, that teenagers didn’t want to go the board book section to get their books.
It has been a total shift. It was such a small market. There weren’t that many people, and it was very much more driven by the librarians and the educators. Now it’s equal librarians, educators, and booksellers, fans and stuff. It was a very narrow world, and now with so many people coming in, there is such a wealth of voices that the diversity has exploded. We still have a long way to go, but it definitely has made it so that there are a lot more voices, a lot more representations of different kinds of people in YA.
Did that kind of affect the way you wrote your next books as you saw YA changing?
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I think so. I’ve been aware that my books are not as diverse as I would like them to be. It’s something that I keep in the back of my mind. It’s that balance between writing the story you want to write and the one you’re inspired to write, but also fit in the things you want to fit in. It’s a constant balance, but I’ve been thrilled with the changes in YA. Teenagers need all kinds of voices, especially when you’re a teenager and you’re going through a hard time, looking for something that speaks to you. The more voices we have, the better.
With Saint Anything, you tackle darker territory. I’ve read most of your books, and I really loved this one.
Oh, thank you!
What made you decide to go a little darker with this book? Was it something that naturally came to you?
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Well, I kind of went through a dark period—not as dark as Peyton obviously—but I went through a dark period in high school. I’ve tried to write about it before, but I did not have a lot of luck. It had been a little too close to me. I decided to maybe write about someone who was going through a dark period and kind of going off the beaten path in a bad way from the point of view of the family.
I knew guys like Peyton. I hung out with guys like Peyton, who came from really good families, had every opportunity, and still were drawn to trouble, still were drawn to breaking into the guard house at school or breaking into a house in a neighborhood, just to do it. I always wanted to address that part of my past, but I realized that doing it from a narrator’s point of view wasn’t working. I started a book, and it didn’t work, so I set it aside.
But adolescence can be dark, but it can also be not dark. I think it depends on the teenager; it depends on who you are at that age. Your biggest problem can be some conflict with your friend or your biggest problem could be that you have a drug problem or it could be that you are in a relationship that’s not healthy. The darkness is sort of inevitable, but I feel like this book is not—like the cover is literally dark—but the story is wider. It reminds me of The Truth about Forever or Just Listen more than the last few books.
So I read your Seventeen article, and it was great. It was nice to see this different side of you because you’re so delightful and wonderful on Twitter.
It’s not my real personality!
To see you tell a story like that, it was a way to kind of relate to you on a new level. Actually, my best friend, who is also a big fan of yours, came up with this question, and I’m going to say it how she did since she worded it really well: With this article in mind, what advice would you give girls and women alike about safety and combating misogynistic views? Because your characters are always lost or trying to find themselves, but they’re never helpless or weak.
I think it’s sort of the same idea in the article, which is trust your gut. It has taken me a long time to get to that point. I grew up in the South, and with southern girls, it’s always be sweet, be kind, don’t ruffle feathers, don’t hurt people’s feelings. And your friend network is important in high school, at least it was to me because I had issues with my mom, and my friends were like my family. Any disruption in that family of friends can sort of throw things off. So with this person, who I was friendly with and he wanted to be more than friends, it made it complicated if I didn’t want to be with him. I sort of disrupted the universe of our entire extended friend family.
I think for girls it’s just that you have to trust yourself. As an adult, now when I meet someone, if they give me the creeps, I’m just going to keep my distance. But that was a really hard thing for me to come around to. Trust your gut. It’s hard to do as a teen because you haven’t had that many experiences where you’ve just been by yourself and have to learn to trust your own instincts. Thankfully, you had adults; you’ve had your parents or guardian there to say this is what you should do or to guide you. As a parent myself now, I can’t imagine when my daughter starts dating and stuff. I don’t know what I’m going to do! I’m going to lock her in a room and make sure she doesn’t do anything. (laughs)
But I would say to trust your instincts, your opinion counts and your feelings count.
Click NEXT to continue and read about Sarah’s favorite characters & TV shows.
We talked about the dark side, but there is a lighter side to this book. What I love about your supporting characters is that they all have these quirks; they have these fun things about them that make them interesting. Like Layla with her French fries. How do you come up with that? Is it based off people you know? I just want to know how you came up with that whole French fry philosophy because I would have never thought of that!
You can have fun with the secondary characters; if you make a narrator too quirky and too weird, then it’s hard for the reader to see themselves through that person’s eyes.
When I met my husband in high school, he ate his French fries with mustard, which I thought was the weirdest thing in the world. You know, everyone has their own thing. I know people who mix in the pepper and the ketchup and everything. But it kind of came from—I don’t even know where! Layla just sprang from my brain fully-formed. She kind of just walked in, sat down, and started talking. It’s so much more fun with the secondary characters because you can make them a little more flamboyant, a little bit crazier since the readers don’t need to live through them necessarily.
What about which of your characters are you the most like?
Oh, that’s hard. I would say I’m the most like Halley from Someone Like You, when I was in high school. But really, it was Halley, who was the first of my girls who was more of the observer and have the dynamic best friend—that was totally me. I mean Sydney is the same way. I felt like I was invisible. I had an older brother, who was not like Peyton, but was very successful and accomplished in school, and I was not. I always felt like I was in his shadow a little bit. I think all of the girls—the invisible girls—feel like they’re trailing along behind the more dynamic friend. Like Remy in This Lullaby is the least like me, which made her the most fun to write because I got to be like that girl for a while. Be like the girl who can open a locked door with a credit card, you know. I could never do that, but my friend could do that! I think the girls who are more observers and then sort of find their voice a little bit, that’s me. Most of the narrators are me at some point in my life. There’s little bit of me in everybody.
One of my writers came up with the question: Which of your books would you want your daughter to read first when she’s old enough? You say there are bits of yourself in all of them, so she might be discovering a new side of you as she reads them. Is there one or a few you really anticipate her reading?
I don’t know. She loves to read, and I would probably want to give her Someone Like You first. The true story of Someone Like You, even though there is a relationship between Halley and Macon, is really a story about friendship. It’s a story about how important friendship is; people always quote that “Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend.” Maybe that would be the first one I’d give her, but I’m really a little skeeved out by her reading my books because I don’t know what she’s going to think. I’m afraid she’s going to read them, and usually you think your mom doesn’t understand you at all when you’re a teenager, how do you even think you can write about it? She’s going to be a teenager in six years; who knows, maybe my books will be wildly outdated by then.
Right now, she doesn’t really have a concept of them—she knows that we go to the bookstore, we go to the library, and there are my books. But she doesn’t really know what they’re about. I hope she wants to read them; I hope she’ll be curious and not dismiss them out of hand that I don’t know what I’m talking about. We’ll see.
I was going through my bookshelf and found this. *pulls out copy of How To Deal*
Oh my god!
What did you think of the movie? You were one of the early YA adaptations to hit the big screen.
Yes, I was. You know I saw the movie early on; I knew it wasn’t going to be like the books because they took two books that had nothing to do with each other and crammed them together. So I had made my peace with it. I had a friend, who was a writer of adaptations, and she said that you have to look at it as a two-hour commercial for your book. Which is what I did. But I realized I had a choice. The movie came out in July, but I saw it in April. So, I can either take my toys, go home and be like “This is not what I wanted and I’m upset and I’m not going to be any part of it!” or I could just enjoy the ride and the process.
The way I looked at it is the books on the shelf haven’t changed. If you loved those books, they’re still the same books. I’ve heard from girls who said that “you sold out,” “I’m ashamed of you.” I’m like “I have a mortgage!” “You’re a terrible person, I can’t believe you did this to Halley!” You know what, Halley is fine; she’s still on your shelf, she has not changed. This is just a totally different thing. And I’ve never loved a book and saw a movie and held it against the book if I didn’t like the movie. The book is always still the book. There have been some great adaptations; movies aren’t always great adaptations. My favorite book in the world is A Prayer for Owen Meany, which was made into this horrible movie called Simon Birch.
Oh god.
That was my favorite book in the whole world, and then I watched about half of it and thought “Oh my god, this is terrible.”
I read both books How To Deal was based on after I saw the movie and thought they were so much better.
At first, they wanted to do like a novelization of the script, and then I had like a total nervous breakdown because what are they doing?! So I was glad the books were released as the way they should be.
Do you hope for your books to make it back to the big screen?
I would love it! I feel like everyone’s books are getting optioned except for mine right now. What is going on?! I need to call my agent, and be like “Get on this right now!” I have a film agent right now; so I’m hoping in the next couple weeks there’ll be something.
But my books don’t have that hook. They don’t have the vampires, dystopia, and all that. I don’t know. It’s so random and so out of my control. I’m hoping someone will notice me and think I’m cute and make a movie out of my book.
One final question. Since I follow you on the Twitter and I like how obsessed you are with GMA and Veronica Mars, do you have any TV shows you would want to recommend?
I was going to talk about my obsession with Broadchurch. Have you watched Broadchurch?
No, I’ve only seen a few episodes of Gracepoint (the American remake).
That doesn’t count!
I know!
Season one of Broadchurch is on Netflix, and I’m going to talk about it tonight because I always talk about it in my speech about how it got me through my writing slump. But season one is on Netflix; watch the first episode, and you will get completely hooked. It was like my favorite new show that I loved. David Tennant, I’m like obsessed with him, and I thought that I discovered him personally, not realizing that he had been in Harry Potter and playing the Doctor in Doctor Who. But yes, that’s one of my favorite shows, and Friday Night Lights and all of the other shows I’ve been obsessed with.
Thank you so much to Sarah Dessen for taking time to out of her hectic book tour schedule to speak with me. To learn more about Saint Anything, read our review.
Saint Anything is now available wherever books are sold.
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