An interview with E. Lockhart

By Meg Rivera

 

LUXURY. Private islands. Amnesia. These set the stage for Cadence Sinclair Eastman’s 15th summer, as written by celebrated YA author E. Lockhart. Born Emily Jenkins, her work has grabbed the attention of teens around the world, as well as the Goodreads Choice award for Best Young Adult Fiction for her latest novel We Were Liars.

Emily was in Cebu last 21 March for a book signing event at the SM branch of National Bookstore. We sit and chat for her and talk about writing the impossible, growing up and the universal truth that all families are alike, no matter the privilege.

Having had a look at your biography — writer, Columbia University graduate, fastest typist in your 8th grade class — how far has the 8th grade student come?

(Laughs) Thank you for remembering that! I think I’m very much the same person because I’ve spent my life writing about how it felt to be 15, 17 years old. I was kind of a bookish, sensitive teenager and I’m very much the same now.

How do you think she’s grown up?

I think I have a really great job. And it was not a job that I really understood when I was young, but it was a job that I wanted [since] I wanted to write stories as a very little kid. I went to graduate school and got this doctorate in Victorian literature and for a while I thought it had been a mistake because I didn’t really want to be a college professor and I didn’t want to write [those kinds of] scholarly books. But I think that it wasn’t a mistake in the long run because I found it so difficult to get that degree and so difficult to write the dissertation that when I finished, I had a lot of confidence.

I thought I did this thing that seemed impossible. And now, I want to write a novel so I’m not that scared to try it.

Right, like most people who have gone skydiving and said “I’ve jumped out of a plane. What else do I have to be scared of?”

Yeah! Except that it took eight years instead of a minute and a half.

You write mostly about young people – teenage girls falling in love for the first time, school, cliques and friends — that seems to be a running theme in your work. Is there are a reason why you write about this time in a person’s life?

It largely has to do with who my publisher is. I wrote some grownup books when I was younger and there was an adult novel of mine that had a teenage character. It felt like everybody who read that book said how much they liked the babysitter character, and she was not the centre of the story!

Then an editor invited me to try writing a proposal for a book for teenagers and I went out and read a bunch of the stuff that’s being published then.

So I went to the bookstore and it was a newly-created section of the bookstore at the time and they had moved that section out of the children’s area. I got all these books and read up about the field and it was Ann Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series and, Louise Rennison’s Georgia Nicolson series.

I read all these books and thought “These are really smart, they are fast moving but they are sensitive. They are funny but they’re true. They’re voicey and I thought I think I can do this, and I would really like to. And so I wrote The Boyfriend List and it was a success. I had a great relationship with a publisher who wanted to put out books by me and this gave me a chance to make a living as a writer and have an audience, and I’ve never really looked back.

Did Harry Potter ever feature in all of this research?

Well Harry Potter is middle grade, so no, that was not I was being asked to write. I was being asked to write Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants but more edgy.

Have you got a teenage daughter? Does she read any of your work?

I do now! Yeah, she reads my work. She’s a big reader and she reads lots of other people. She doesn’t think it’s particularly cool. Her friends’ parents do though.

Let’s talk We Were Liars. One thing that comes right at you is how violently the characters go through emotion. Why so intense?

I think as a writer you’re always looking for a way to show rather than to tell emotion. So sometimes you do it through your characters in action. So instead of saying that they really like each other, you write a scene where they flirt in a really funny way.

It was the same here, I wanted to find a way to convey how deeply this character was feeling. But she has a family that doesn’t like to talk about pain and I thought How can I possibly have her talking about pain as if she has a vocabulary for that? I needed to find something that was a different way to do it.

Is this book based on a real family?

No! My gosh, those people are horrible! No, I think I was interested in the King Lear setup, a patriarch who has three beautiful daughters who are in competition for his favor and his money. And I was interested in the grandchildren of this patriarch and the way they would view that kind of family conflict. That was the starting point for the book.

(The main character) Cady keeps recalling events from the past in the story, but how does she turn around and start facing the future?

I don’t really ever know much more than what I’ve put on the page. If I had more story to tell I might have told it. I think that it’s a book about moving through guilt, loss and coming to terms with the truths about yourself and your family and your loved ones. That’s always a healing process. It’s a sad book, but I would hope it’s a hopeful book.

And as a final note, what would you say to anyone who wants to drop their lives and write? I know you’ve been asked this before, but what would you tell them that’s different?

I think that it is very paralysing to try and write something good. So I pretty much free myself of any obligation to write a good story when I am sitting down to write. I let myself write the stupidest thing that could ever happen.

Whatever I’ve written, that’s better than not having written. And I go back to rewrite over and over but freeing myself from standards of perfection or of your ambition to make something beautiful is really an important step. It wasn’t until I wrote the stupid draft of that stupid book that I felt that I was able to write.

(We Were Liars is now available in National Bookstore branches everywhere.)