Malinda Lo

Last week my article about lesbian/bisexual characters in young adult fiction was published at AfterEllen.com (read it here). For the article, I interviewed a bunch of authors including Ellen Wittlinger (Love & Lies: Marisol’s Story), Mayra Lazara Dole (Down to the Bone) and Carrie Mac (Crush).

I wasn’t able to use most of what these authors told me in the article, because that’s the way it goes when you write an article like this — you end up picking out various quotes that fit into the story and leaving out a lot of good stuff. However, now I have this blog! And I thought: Why not post all these interview extras right here? So, every Monday for the next three weeks (beginning today), I’ll be posting my full interviews with Ellen, Mayra and Carrie. I hope you enjoy them!

Interview with Ellen Wittlinger

Ellen Wittlinger is the author of the Printz Honor book Hard Love as well as numerous other young adult novels. Her most recent book, Love & Lies: Marisol’s Story, is a companion to Hard Love written from the perspective of out lesbian teen Marisol Guzman, who takes a year off before college to write a novel, hang out in Harvard Square, and fall in love. It was recently nominated for a Lambda Book Award.

Malinda Lo: There were almost ten years between the publication of Hard Love and Love & Lies. Why so long?

Ellen Wittlinger: I never thought I’d write a sequel. In my experience sequels are usually disappointing to readers who loved the first book, so that seemed daunting. Also, when Hard Love ended, Marisol was ready to go off to college. It’s always been an unwritten rule of YA novels that the protagonists need to be in high school, so I didn’t know how to get around that. Of course, I could have continued with John’s story, I guess, but by the time I finished writing Hard Love I’d come to see Marisol as the more interesting of the two characters, and I knew she was the one I’d want to follow.

People just kept asking for a sequel, and finally I hit on the idea of having Marisol take a year off before she goes to college to try to write a novel. That seemed like the kind of thing someone as confident as Marisol would attempt, so I finally plunged into a sequel.

ML: If you could compare the process of writing Hard Love vs. writing Love & Lies, how did they differ? How were they similar?

EW: Hard Love was much easier to write. I’d just discovered the whole underground zine culture and was excited to be tapping into that. I’d been wanting to write a gay or lesbian character into the book and was also excited (although nervous) about doing that. But I have to say, Hard Love practically wrote itself—I fell in love with the characters and really enjoyed being in their minds. And writing all the zine entries was so much fun—it allowed me to show the distinct voices of all three zine writers.

Getting back into Marisol’s mind ten years later was difficult. My biggest worry was that I wouldn’t make her as interesting the second time around, that I’d somehow fail all the readers—gay and straight—who had responded to her so positively. I had to keep reminding myself what made her who she was. And then, of course, I had to find ways to bring John and Birdie back into the second book in ways that didn’t seem contrived. It was much more of a stuggle, and I second-guessed myself along the way.

ML: How do you feel that the publishing industry has changed in the last ten years with regard to YA fiction about LGBT teens?

EW: Well, one obvious way is that there is so much more of it—the publishing door has swung much wider. When I wrote Hard Love there were very few, if any, GLBT books that didn’t deal primarily with the issue of coming out. We’d gotten past the era when the gay character dies, or at least his dog dies, but GLBT books were kind of stuck at coming out stories.

That was the main reason I wanted to have a gay or lesbian character in my book, so I could show her having gotten past that moment and just living the kind of life any teenager lives. I wanted to write a character that was comfortable in her skin. Now there are many books in which that’s the case, in which a character’s sexual orientation is known, but it isn’t the central concern of the book. I don’t know if publishers get the credit for that or writers. I guess times change, and publishing has been changing along with it.

ML: You’ve described yourself as “white, straight, female, middle-class.” Marisol is not white and not straight. Authors obviously write about many different kinds of people; how did you prepare yourself to write from Marisol’s point of view?

EW: I didn’t specifically prepare for it. I had lived in Provincetown for three years in the mid-’70s and had lots of gay and lesbian friends with whom I’d always felt a strong kinship. For a variety of reasons I’d had long struggles with my own parents, and I empathized with the difficulties so many of my gay friends had coming out in those less enlightened times. Many of my books have secondary characters who happen to be gay—it’s a commitment I made to those friends. In fact, if either of my children were gay I was looking forward to being just as wacky and well-meaning as Marisol’s mother, the PFLAG president.

I’d also like to say that, while a writer always needs to be vigilant when writing outside his or her own box (white, straight, female for me), it’s not actually as difficult as you might think. When I begin to write any character I start at the inside where everybody is alike—that is, everybody has strong emotions and hurts and loves. If you start defining your character there, you’ll know who he or she is before you get to those outer layers where characteristics like skin color and sexual orientation reside. If the only thing you know about your character is that she’s a lesbian, you’ll certainly write a stereotype.

ML: There is sex in Love & Lies, but it is not graphic. Do you think there’s a particular way that actual sex—particularly LGBT sex—should be handled in YA fiction?

EW: Well, I haven’t written graphic sex in any of my novels with gay or straight characters (although I suppose the school boards that wanted to censor Sandpiper would disagree). I think you can only write what you’re comfortable writing, and there’s a point beyond which I’m not comfortable going in novels for teenagers. Some writers extend the boundaries farther than I do, which is fine.

Kids will read what they’re comfortable with and put the book down if they’re not. My feeling is that most teenagers would rather read about the romantic aspects of sex, the emotional component, anyway.

ML: The character of Olivia Frost, in the end, turns out to be a manipulative liar, as well as bisexual. Were you worried that might bring her dangerously close to the stereotype of the lying, manipulative bisexual villain of old? Why or why not?

EW: Well, Olivia Frost was certainly the character I worried most about as far as making her a fully rounded character. And, in fact, she isn’t. We don’t know her well enough to see what might be appealing about her (other than her looks) or what might have led her to become so conniving.

But I didn’t want to add that element—I didn’t think we needed to know her whole story. We only needed to see the way in which she manipulates Marisol. I didn’t worry that Olivia fulfilled a bisexual stereotype, but only that she clearly had few redeeming qualities. In fact, I thought of her as a sociopath from the outset. Marisol is so strong—it seemed to me it would take someone like Olivia to really rock her world—and I wanted it rocked.

ML: Are there any YA books about LGBT characters that you would particularly recommend?

EW: Sure. A recent favorite of mine is Paul Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You. Julie Anne Peters can’t write a book I don’t love. Luna and Keeping You A Secret should be on anybody’s short list, as should Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. Nancy Garden has a great new anthology called Hear Us Out! Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle, Progress and Hope. Marion Dane Bauer’s short story anthology Am I Blue? is a classic, as is M.E. Kerr’s Deliver Us From Evie. For a really comprehensive GLBT booklist, go to Lee Wind’s blog: I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read?.

ML: Do you have any plans to write more books about Marisol or the characters in Love & Lies?

EW: I don’t at the moment. But never say never!

Portions of this interview originally appeared in slightly different form in the article “Young Adult Books Move Beyond the Coming-Out Story, But Still Face Hurdles.” For more on Ellen Wittlinger, visit her website.